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Directors: Tom Tykwer Screenplay: Tom Tykwer Starring: Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Heino Ferch, Herbert Knaup, Joachim Król, Nina Petri Running Time: 82 minutes Studio: X-Filme Creative Pool (Sony Pictures Classics, U.S. distribution) MPAA Rating: Not rated |
Janet Maslin of The New York Times has called Run Lola Run "hot, fast and post-human," a quote that's plastered all over the film's ads. On the other side of the coin, Chris Gore of Film Threat magazine (the anti-Hollywood movie magazine) raved about the German film on an episode of The X Show, on the FX cable network. Writer/director Tom Tykwer saw his film win the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival and Best Picture at the Seattle Film Festival.
What's all the fuss about? Stripped to its bare bones, Run Lola Run is the same twenty-minute story told three times over the film's less than 90 minute running time.
"Running time" is quite apropos. Star Franka Potente spends at least half of the picture running through the streets of (Munich?), racing against a twenty-minute, 100,000 deutschmark deadline on her boyfriend Manni's (Moritz Bleibtreu) life. Manni has futzed a drug deal by losing the money on the subway, and calls Lola (Potente) in desperate fear of his life. In twenty minutes, he has to cough up the dough, or crime boss Ronnie (Heino Ferch) will kill him.
Bare-bones setup, told in less than three minutes. Now, get running, Lola! Potente, from the beginning, depicts Lola as an elemental force, her shock of fire-red hair marking her progress as her powerful, untiring legs propel her, Hermes-like, toward her father's (Herbert Knaup) bank, and then to Manni. She unwittingly affects the lives of people she passes, as Tykwer shows in clever, snapshot summaries. And as though this technique weren't enough to fascinate and entertain us, he shows moments away from Lola's frantic run as devoid of color, shot on video, with washed-out lighting and pale characters. It's as though Lola carries the gift of life itself, as we will see later. When she bursts into a scene, it explodes in color, with sharp, 35mm images and full stereo sound. Describing the movie like this makes the technique sound gimmicky and film-schoolish, but it works.
So powerful does Lola become, that by the tragic conclusion of the first arc, she can literally rewrite her life. She does so twice, learning more each time she lives through these twenty minutes, much like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but more vital.
