July 1–8, 1999

movie shorts

Run Lola Run

recommended

With the year’s most prepackaged weekend of family fun approaching like, oh, some damn asteroid hurtling through outer space, Run Lola Run is set to go up against the unstoppable juggernaut of Wild Wild West. Sure, it’s just some tiny German movie starring people no one’s ever heard of, but Run Lola Run has something all Will Smith’s megabucks can’t. It has cool.

In concept, if not setting, Lola is a lot like an old Twilight Zone episode. Cadmium-haired Lola (Franka Potente) has 20 minutes to find 100,000 marks, get across town and meet her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), or else he dies. (It involves a drug deal gone bad, but you don’t really have to know that.) Since the movie is 80 minutes long, it’s not giving anything away to reveal she doesn’t quite make it the first time, and when she fails, the film resets itself and Lola is back at the beginning, getting Manni’s fateful phone call all over again. She tries again, she fails again. On to round three.

What makes Lola more than a punk rock-inflected X-Files has nothing to do with plot and everything to do with aesthetics. From the moment the film cranks up its pulsing techno score, it’s clear we’re not in Hollywood anymore. Once Lola has started her everlasting sprint, the music runs almost without stopping for the next 70 minutes. Even when the volume drops to allow us to hear the film’s few exchanges of dialogue, an incessant tick-tick-tick keeps time underneath.

Even when the movie reluctantly concedes to a bit of exposition, the music is so loud and so seductive you can barely follow the subtitles, which is exactly how director, writer and co-composer Tom Tykwer wants it. More important than the details of why Manni needs the money or what will happen if Lola fails is something a policeman tells us during Lola’s abstract prologue, where the camera slides through a blurry crowd of people: "The ball is round, the game lasts 90 minutes, and that’s a fact."

But if Run Lola Run is a soccer game, then Tykwer plays it with Australian rules: Lola’s race across town is about the only straight line in Tykwer’s angular construction. Not only does the film shift into animation at regular intervals, but the story spins off at tangents, using a series of rapid-fire snapshots to show the future history of characters Lola passes on her journey. A sour-faced woman with a baby carriage has her child taken from her the first time Lola bumps into her, then wins the lottery the second time around. In exploding a single moment into a series of alternate futures, Tykwer is doing on celluloid what the cartoonist Chris Ware does with his deconstructionist Acme Novelty Library, using a limited situation to test the boundaries of the art form.

In a sense, Run Lola Run is just a sophisticated popcorn movie. There’s no doubt that when you see an ambulance screech to a halt inches from a pane of glass on Lola’s first go-round it won’t be long before it’s smashing through it in slow motion; Tykwer’s not one to withhold his whammies for too long. More than that, though, what makes Lola so invigorating is its sheer sense of cinematic adventure. Tykwer may be breaking rules just to break rules, but, like fellow adult terrible Lars von Trier, he has you running down the alley with him, looking over your shoulder for the movie police, laughing all the way. There could be more method to his madness, more purpose to his rule-breaking, but there’s something inarguably exhilarating about having the history of cinema crammed into 80 minutes, or at least watching someone try. Lola is the kind of iconoclastic, preconception-shedding movie that a filmmaker only gets to make once in his career; any hint of repetition in his next movie would be merely pathetic. But one Run Lola Run is all you need. And besides, your parents will hate it.

—Sam Adams