Product: Run, Lola, Run [VHS] (1999)
Rating: 4.0
This Is NOT Groundhog Day!!!!!
I don't know how the comparison got started, but Groundhog Day resembles Lola Rennt (its original German title) about as much as much as cooking sherry resembles a good merlot. Both will get you drunk, and how you get there is up to you -- but the low-rent route may not agree with your stomach all that well. This may sound as if I'm getting ready to slam Groundhog Day -- not at all. It was a good movie, though not great, but there was a certain amount of formula to it -- i.e., Bill Murray plays one of his stock cynical jerk characters, who because of an extraordinary series of circumstances, undergoes a complete personality facelift by the movie's end. This is all well and good, and it makes for a fun movie -- but nobody will ever confuse it with a really classic comedy like It Happened One Night.Okay, so how does all this blathering relate to Lola Rennt? Well, as I said, the comparison is absurd, a true case of apples and oranges if ever I've seen one. GD was a comedy which pretended to have serious overtones; Lola on the other hand is a serious, experimental film which refuses to take itself all that seriously. It has a definite sense of humor about itself, and even seems to parody itself at certain points. Also, Groundhog Day is about a man trapped in repeating the same day over and over again -- whereas Lola (and this is where the confusion started, I think) is about a woman faced with a difficult choice, who runs through possible scenarios of how her choices will work out -- but (and I wish I could use italics here to emphasize this) only the last of these occurs in real life! The first two are Lola running through these possible events in her own mind, speculating on how it will go -- will I get killed, will my boyfriend get killed, etc.? This is a small but crucial point that a lot of people seem to miss, and it's also the biggest reason why Lola Rennt is cut from a completely different cloth than Groundhog Day.So, having said all that, let me now talk about the movie. The plot is simple: Lola's boyfriend Manni loses 100,000 Marks through a stupid accident (it's made obvious straightaway that Manni isn't the brightest bulb in the lamp), and Lola must help him come up with the cash in 20 minutes or he will die. There then follows three separate versions of how that happens, two speculative on Lola's part, the final one the way it really happens. Subtle and major changes happen in each successive version of these events, but the connecting thread between all three is that Lola must run to get where she is going. I won't spoil the fun for you by telling all that happens, save that one involves blackmail, another involves a robbery, while the third involves a coincidence that stretches the bounds of believability. Franka Potente is amazing in the title role -- she's a very good actor, and handles the physically demanding role with ease. More than one review has compared what she does to Olympic-quality athleticism, and I have to agree.The film itself, both in terms of script and direction, is highly imaginative -- and you don't have to be a pseudo-intellectual, as one of the other reviewers suggested, to appreciate it. There are lots of lovely touches throughout -- the way the car accident happens differently each time, the hobo on the bicycle, the Bergmanesque conversations between Lola's father and his lover. Best of all are the brilliant "AND THEN:" sequences, which in several seconds of snapshots show the possible futures of minor characters and extras in the film, which again are different every time, and which swing wildly from hilarity and irony to tragedy and chilling sorrow. These are some of the movie's best moments, and they really add to the pulsing rhythms of the main story. Another nice touch is Lola's scream, which shatters glass -- suggesting that Lola has become a force of nature, and woe betide the poor S.O.B. who gets in her way. These moments make you laugh, but the laughter is of a decidedly nervous variety, because you sense that such tremendous passion will lead Lola to trouble (as if it hasn't already, considering what her unreasoning love for Manni has led her into!).A lot of "art-house" films have the tendency to take themselves way (and I mean WAY) too seriously; Lola Rennt, if anything, almost goes too far in the opposite direction. It does a lot of its work with a sly-wink-and-a-nod feel that is amusing (and as I said above, there are moments of self-parody that are very good), but this playful tone at times almost upends the story's more serious aspects. That, along with the hard-to-swallow moments in the third storyline, has led me to give Lola Rennt four stars instead of five. However, it's still head and shoulders above most of the other experimental art films I've seen lately. I wholeheartedly reccommend it to you, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.