Run Lola Run

Run Lola Run

Original German release poster
Directed by Tom Tykwer
Produced by Stefan Arndt
Written by Tom Tykwer
Starring Franka Potente
Moritz Bleibtreu
Narrated by Hans Paetsch
Music by Tom Tykwer
Johnny Klimek
Reinhold Heil
Cinematography Frank Griebe
Edited by Mathilde Bonnefoy
Production
company
X-Filme Creative Pool
WDR
Arte
Distributed by Prokino Filmverleih
Release dates
  • 20 August 1998 (1998-08-20)
Running time
 81 minutes
Country Germany
Language German
Budget $1.75 million[1]
Box office $22,879,455[1]

Run Lola Run (German: Lola rennt, literally "Lola runs" or "Lola is running") is a 1998 German thriller film written and directed by Tom Tykwer and starring Franka Potente as Lola and Moritz Bleibtreu as Manni. The story follows a woman who needs to obtain 100,000 Deutsche Mark in twenty minutes to save her boyfriend's life. The film's three scenarios are reminiscent of the 1981 Krzysztof Kieślowski film Blind Chance; following Kieślowski's death, Tykwer directed his planned film Heaven.

Plot

Introduction

Lola (Franka Potente) receives a frantic phone call from her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu). Manni is a small-time criminal. Manni has just collected 100,000 marks cash in his most recent crime. Lola had agreed to meet Manni at the crime scene and to drive him to deliver the money to his boss, Ronnie. Lola tried to do so, but her moped was stolen en route to meet Manni. When Lola failed to arrive on time, Manni, carrying the cash in a bag, took a subway. Manni panicked when he saw ticket inspectors on his subway car, so he fled and thoughtlessly left the bag of money on the subway. As he does, Manni spotted a homeless man examining Manni's money bag in the subway car. Manni, realizing what he had done, pursued the subway as it departed, only to find the man and the money gone.

Manni calls Lola from a phone booth. He complains that Lola let him down. He tells Lola that unless he raises 100,000 marks to give Ronnie within 20 minutes, Ronnie will kill him. Manni also tells Lola of his plan to rob a nearby supermarket—which, for several obvious reasons, is unwise. Lola implores Manni to wait and promises to find the money. She decides to ask her father (Herbert Knaup), who is a bank manager, for help.

After this telephone call, the rest of the film is divided into three "runs" by Lola, in each of which she tries to obtain the money and save Manni. Each run starts from the same situation, but develops differently and has a different outcome. Each run has brief flashforward sequences that show how the lives of the people that Lola bumps into develop after the encounter.

The house in Albrechtstraße (Berlin-Mitte) where the three episodes begin

First run

Lola hangs up the phone and starts running (in a cartoon sequence) down the staircase of her apartment. She passes a man with a dog; the dog growls at her, causing her to sprint faster. Then she is seen running (back in real life, not in a cartoon) through the streets of Berlin towards her father's bank and she collides with a woman pushing a baby carriage, who is shown to later steal a baby after having lost custody of her own. Continuing, Lola runs alongside a cyclist who offers to sell her his bike, which she refuses; a flash-forward shows him being robbed on his bike, but later marrying a nurse from the hospital in which he recovered. Lola then causes a car crash, which involves her father's colleague, Mr. Meyer, and Manni's boss, Ronnie. As Lola arrives at the bank, she passes a banker shown later to be paralyzed in a car accident, then killing herself shortly after. Then Papa's mistress reveals she is pregnant, causing Papa to dismiss Lola's request for help; Papa reveals Lola isn't his biological daughter, and announces he is leaving his family to elope with his mistress.

Meanwhile, Manni uses a blind lady's phone card to request money from an apparent friend, only to fail. Lola keeps on running and ends up parallel to an ambulance that narrowly misses crashing into a glass pane carried by workmen. Lola runs on to meet Manni, she realises he has already began the robbery. She shouts his name trying to stop him, but he is unable to hear her calls and proceeds to rob the store. Lola decides to help him. Once they obtain the money, they flee on foot but find themselves surrounded by police. Manni throws the bag with money up in the air, causing a nervous police officer to accidentally shoot Lola in the chest.

Fatally wounded, Lola recalls a conversation with Manni about their love, whether she wanted to leave Manni. The movie returns to dying Lola. Her decision was to not leave Manni, and she doesn't want to die, and the film then reverts to their phone call at the beginning.

Second run

Lola hangs up the phone and starts running, only to be tripped by the man with the dog; falling down the stairs, Lola injures her leg, which makes her limp. Running to the bank, she collides with the woman pushing a baby carriage, who would later win a lottery and live a luxurious life. Passing the cyclist, she accuses him of stealing the bike he is selling; a flash forward shows he became homeless. Manni, again borrowing the blind lady's phone card, unsuccessfully tries to borrow money.

After causing another car accident between Mr. Meyer and Ronnie, Lola arrives at the bank moments later; the delay due to her limp allows Papa's mistress to explain he isn't the child's father. Lola hears more of the argument this time and becomes infuriated. Taking a security officer's gun, Lola robs the bank and, in the process, passes the banker; a flash forward shows her falling in love with one of her colleagues. Lola escapes because the police mistake her for a fleeing hostage. Passing the ambulance, Lola asks to ride in the vehicle, distracting the driver and causing it to hit the carried pane of glass. Still late for the rendezvous with Manni by moments, Lola calls his name, only this time he hears her call. Manni holsters his gun and walks to Lola, only to be hit by the hastened ambulance, which makes him fatally wounded.

Manni recalls asking Lola how she would cope with his death. The film briefly returns to the present day and shows Manni refusing to die before restarting once again at the beginning of Lola's run.

Third run

Lola hangs up the phone and starts running and leaps over the punk and his dog. Running to the bank, she avoids the woman with the baby carriage, who in a flash forward joins the church and devotes herself to God. Lola also narrowly misses the cyclist; the cyclist instead offers his bike to the homeless man, who uses Manni's money to buy it. Further ahead in this timeline Lola is nearly hit by Mr. Meyer's car, preventing his collision with Ronnie. After avoiding Ronnie's car, Mr. Meyer proceeds to pick up Papa. Since Lola can no longer speak to Papa, she didn't know what to do. She told herself to just keep running, and eventually she encountered a casino. She had only 99.2 marks, but somehow convinced the cashier to give her a 100 mark chip. Betting the chip on a roulette table, she wins two consecutive bets, raising 126,000 marks. Approaching the ambulance from behind, Lola climbs inside as it avoids the carried pane of glass. Recognizing the patient inside as a security guard from her father's bank, Lola realizes he has suffered a heart attack, and holds his hand to help calm him.

Meanwhile, the blind lady from whom Manni borrows a phone card leads Manni to notice the homeless man with his money, who passes on the cyclist's bike. Manni chases him, inadvertently causing a car crash between Ronnie, Mr. Meyer, and the man who stole Lola's moped. Mr. Meyer and Papa died in the crash, as well as the thief. Manni manages to retrieve his money, trading it for his gun. Lola reaches the supermarket, but cannot find Manni. A car then pulls up with Manni and Ronnie inside, who shake hands. Manni, no longer in need of the 100,000 marks, asks Lola what is in the bag she is carrying, only for the film to end in a freeze-frame on Lola's reaction in an elliptical instant before a possible flash-forward.

Cast

Themes

The film features two allusions to Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo. Like that film, it features recurring images of spirals, such as the 'Spirale' Cafe behind Manni's phone box and the spiral staircase down which Lola runs. In addition, the painting on the back wall of the casino of a woman's head seen from behind is based on a shot in Vertigo: Tykwer disliked the empty space on the wall behind the roulette table and commissioned production designer Alexander Manasse to paint a picture of Kim Novak as she appeared in Vertigo. Manasse could not remember what she looked like in the film therefore he decided to paint the famous shot of the back of her head. The painting took fifteen minutes to complete.[2] The bed sheets in the red scenes also feature spiral designs which add to the allusion.

There are also several references to German culture in the film. The most notable is the use of Hans Paetsch as a narrator. Paetsch is a famous voice of children's stories in Germany, recognized by millions. Many of the small parts are cameos by famous German actors (for example the bank teller). Also, two quotes by German football legend Sepp Herberger appear: "The ball is round, the game lasts 90 minutes, everything else is pure theory," and, "After the game is before the game."

The film touches on themes such as free will vs. determinism, the role of chance in people's destiny, and obscure cause-effect relationships. Through brief flash-forward sequences of still images, Lola's fleeting interactions with bystanders are revealed to have surprising and drastic effects on their future lives, serving as concise illustrations of chaos theory's butterfly effect, in which minor, seemingly inconsequential variations in any interaction can blossom into much wider results than is often recognized. (However, another explanation is that Lola's interactions with them didn't really cause anything. It's just that each person inherently has vastly different possibilities of life trajectory, a different version of which is explored and shown in the three iterations.) The film's exploration of the relationship between chance and conscious intention comes to the foreground in the casino scene, where Lola appears to defy the laws of chance through sheer force of will, improbably making the roulette ball land on her winning number with the help of a glass-shattering scream.

The thematic exploration of free will vs. determinism is made clear from the start. In the film's brief prologue, an unseen narrator asks a series of rhetorical questions that prime the audience to view the film through a metaphysical lens touching on traditional philosophical questions involving determinism vs. philosophic libertarianism, as well as epistemology. The theme is reinforced through the repeated appearance of a blind woman who briefly interacts with Manni in each alternative reality, and seems to have supernatural understandings of both the present and potential futures in those realities. The film ultimately seems to favor a compatiblist philosophical view to the free will question as evidenced by the casino scene and by the final telephone booth scene in which the blind woman redirects Manni's attention to a passerby, which enables him to make an important choice near the film's climax.

However, the film can also be regarded as emphasizing the free will side, as in each iteration, Lola improved the outcome by being more and more determined and assertive of her actions. Other characters' stories can be regarded as only asides to Lola's: they didn't take resolute and self-aware actions as Lola did so they got mostly random outcomes.

Several moments in the film allude to a supernatural awareness of the characters. For example, in the first reality, Manni shows a nervous Lola how to use a gun by removing the safety, while in the second timeline she removes the safety as though she remembers what to do. This suggests that she might have the memory of the events depicted in the previous timeline. Also, the bank's guard said to Lola "you finally came" in the third timeline, as if he remembered Lola's appearances in the previous two.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack of the film, by Tykwer, Johnny Klimek, and Reinhold Heil, includes numerous musical quotations of the sustained string chords of The Unanswered Question, an early 20th-century chamber ensemble work by American composer Charles Ives. In the original work, the chords are meant to represent "the Silences of the Druids—who Know, See and Hear Nothing."

The techno soundtrack established dialectical relation between motives of the movie: Rhythm, Repetition, and Interval among various spatio-temporal logics. This produces unification of contradictions like Time and Space or The cyclical and the linear.[3]

Locations

A supermarket in Berlin-Charlottenburg, which served as the filming location for Manni's and Lola's robbery.

Run Lola Run was filmed in and around Berlin, Germany. Here are some of the locations:[4]

Critical reception

The film was nominated for 41 awards, including the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language. It won 26. These included the Grand Prix of the Belgian Syndicate of Cinema Critics, the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Film at the Seattle International Film Festival, and seven separate wins at the German Film Awards.[5]

As of February 2016, the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 93% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 80 reviews.[6] On Metacritic, another review aggregator, the film had an average score of 77 out of 100, based on 29 reviews, stating the film as having "generally favourable reviews".[7]

In contrasting reviews, Film Threat's Chris Gore said of the film, "[It] delivers everything great foreign films should – action, sex, compelling characters, clever filmmaking, it's unpretentious (a requirement for me) and it has a story you can follow without having to read those annoying subtitles. I can't rave about this film enough – this is passionate filmmaking at its best. One of the best foreign films, heck, one of the best films I have seen", while Jonathan Rosenbaum of The Chicago Reader stated, "About as entertaining as a no-brainer can be—a lot more fun, for my money, than a cornball theme-park ride like Speed, and every bit as fast moving. But don't expect much of an aftertaste."[8][9]

The film was released on DVD on 21 December 1999 and on Blu-ray on 19 February 2008.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 "Run Lola Run". The Numbers. Retrieved 2015-06-24.
  2. ↑ Tom Tykwer, commentary on the DVD edition of the film.
  3. ↑ Puzzle films: complex storytelling in contemporary cinema, by Warren Buckland, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, pages 137–138
  4. ↑ Lola rennt – Berlin Locations. About.com. Retrieved November 18, 2010.
  5. ↑ "Lola Rennt (1998) – Awards". IMDb. Retrieved 2008-09-21.
  6. ↑ "Run Lola Run – Rotten Tomatoes". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 2008-09-21.
  7. ↑ "Run Lola Run (1999): Reviews". Metacritic. Retrieved 2008-09-21.
  8. ↑ Gore, Chris (1999-06-28). "RUN LOLA RUN". Film Threat. Retrieved 2008-09-21.
  9. ↑ "Run Lola Run: Capsule by Jonathan Rosenbaum". The Chicago Reader. Retrieved 2008-09-21.
  10. ↑ "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema | 86. Run Lola Run". Empire.

External links

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