Product: Run, Lola, Run [VHS] (1999)
Rating: 4.0
Lola runs against time, with lots of consequences
The beginning of Run Lola Run has a narrator stating how countless questions result in answers which in turn gives rise to other questions, and so on, in a chain of answers followed by questions. "But in the end, isn't it always the same question, and always the same answer?" The main question might be, will anything I do differently have any consequences? Or why did this happen?Lola's boyfriend Manni has just botched a drug deal, losing 100,000 marks. He has to turn over the money to his connection, a nasty and forbidding bald guy, who will kill him in twenty minutes if he doesn't deliver the goods. Lola, calm, usually on time, and loyal as ever, does what she can to help out her man, who increasingly desperate as time runs out, considers holding up the local supermarket to get the money. She's running a race against time, encountering all sorts of people, including a bicycle courier, a Mr. Meyer who's a colleague of her father, and her father, a humorless, ice-in-his-veins banker who's carrying on with one of his female colleagues, who is pregnant.This portrays three different scenarios of Lola running to save Manni, and demonstrates how one small action or variation can have enormous consequences on other people. An example is the blonde woman walking with the baby carriage. Each time she responds differently to Lola dashing by her. We then see in a series of quick still photo montages what would later happen to her. In one version, she ends up injured from an attack; in another, she ends up winning the lottery. Another is how long the conversation between Lola's father and his lover has progressed before Lola bursts in on them, asking her father for money. Each time, the outcome is different, affecting her father's attitude to her and what Lola does.Another interesting aspect is Lola's piercing glass-shattering scream, which becomes the emanation of her desperation, whether it to be telling her boyfriend to shut up so he can calm down, or her anger at her father refusing to help her.Franka Potente's Lola really lifts the film up, her bright vermilion hair, cyan tank top, and blue jeans nearly mirroring the primary colours of light. She gives credibility in a character who is so much more with it than her boyfriend, whose over-reliance on her makes him incompetent, pathetic, and lacking direction.Director Tom Tykwer must have been influenced by music videos as the swift jump cuts in scenes, nothing that requires a bottle of Dramamine by the TV set, mind you, as the pulsing techno score, matching Lola's frantic running, attest to. An interesting piece of cinema from Germany, great in style and structure.