Run, Lola, Run
Directed by Tom Tykwer
Staring Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu
1998, German with subtitles.
Lola needs 100,000 d-marks in the next 20 minutes, or her boyfriend Manni is toast. Options are limited – ask daddy, knock off a bank, visit the casino… Let’s try all three. The first option gets her shot. The second option gets him shot. The third option – well, it’s happier, anyway. Three time tracks follow Lola and Manni’s bad day in this very non-linear, ultra-intense exploration of how the very smallest differences in daily experience can lead to the most dramatic differences in out come. In each experiment, Lola’s journey is interrupted in slightly different ways by that cartoon dog on the steps of her flat. How each experiment gets reset isn’t clear, and you won’t have time to think about it till you’re safely back in the theater parking lot.
Lola literally runs through out the entire film. Not the self-satisfied shuffle of a morning jog, but the intense burn of the 100 yard sprint, run for a hundred 100 meters with out pause. Driven to save Manni, Lola runs through Berlin to the beat of the throbbing house music soundtrack that leaves the audience more winded than she. As she bumps into innocent bystanders, their future history flashes past your eyes as they win the lotto, discover love, or just trudge on through life. Chance encounters have staggering deep significance when we replay them with only the smallest change in initial conditions. Run, Lola, Run is a sci-fi thriller without the ray guns.