“How do you know you love me?
There is an enormous amount of thought that must go into a review of what is on the face of it a very simple film. We begin with the title, which was changed from the German (Lola Rennt) meaning ‘Lola Runs’ which was changed to something that was more fluid and attention grabbing for an English-speaking audience. The year of release is even wrong, as it premiered in Germany in 1998 but did not find distribution in North America until 1999. Yet despite this fact, the film is constantly tagged with ‘1999’ ranking it in that year that has since been lauded as one of the best years in cinema history. This year (2024), it has been re-released after the original 35mm negative was scanned to 4K. It has been consistently advertised as “the 25th Anniversary” of the film. This should not put us off, instead the confusion surrounding the film’s name and release date is right in line with the film itself.
I rented Run Lola Run from the Hollywood Video near my house as the cover was gravitating. This would have been in the fall of 1999 or the spring of 2000 (we do not have ‘winters’ in East Texas). I was so blown away by what I saw that when I noticed it on a rack in Best Buy, I purchased it for about $20. I know I’ve watched it twice on cassette, at least fifteen times on DVD, and once on streaming when I lived in Canada. I saw it last Friday night 35mm at AMC and that is probably the 20th or so time I’ve seen the film (it could be more, I’m being conservative). I was eager to see this in the cinema for the first time because I was wondering since I had not seen it in over ten years what it looked like on the big screen and why I and others found it so fascinating. There are a ton of things going on.
Tom Tykwer’s film is littered with an enormous amount of well executed, well thought out moments that are repeated in a series of slightly different scenarios. There is the standard ‘repeat’ plot that in the last thirty or so years has been identified as being “like Groundhog Day (1990),” That film, in which Bill Murray plays a weatherman in Pennsylvania, details the exploits of that character repeating an entire day on end. In this way, Groundhog Day is similar to Edge of Tomorrow (2015), the Tom Cruise vehicle in which a soldier must learn as much as he can to survive as long as he can against an alien invader to break the daily repeat pattern. However, Run Lola Run does not repeat the day, rather only twenty minutes. In this way, the film is much more like Monday, an episode of The X-Files in which Special Agent Fox Mulder, fresh from body switching in the previous episode, slowly finds he is repeating a day and must do something radical to get it to stop. In that episode, 15 minutes repeats three times– perfect for a 47-minute episode. The 20 minutes in Run Lola Run is preceded by a pre-credit sequence, the opening credits, and the opening exposition. The ending has only a minute or two of resolution.
The pre-credit sequence is used to get the audience used to the quick paced time framing of the film. The clock starts like a metronome, then stops, giving us a hint at what will happen twice in the film. The guard from the bank appears so we will recognize him in the middle and in the ambulance at the end. He sets the rules of the movie: “the game is 90 minutes, all the other rules are known,” and this sets our expectation. We see their characters and we will interact with later. The line up mug shots in which we cycle through the cast is smart as it introduces us to whom we will see fleetingly in our story but also alerts us that everyone we see (and I do mean everyone) is a criminal of one kind or another. Yes, even her mother. Yes, even Meyer. We hear techno (some would suggest ‘Progressive House’ genre music such as Paul Oakenfold) which deliberately sets the pace via the beat. This is not dissimilar to Tarkovsky’s slow, agonizing shot in Mirror (1972), in which five whole minutes of film pass before you notice the camera has panned in and the lead actor stirs in his sleep. Like the opening of Mirror gets you used to the slow, three hour drag you are about to endure, so the opening of Run Lola Run gets you ready for an 87-minute thrill ride. While Tarkovsky rarely cuts, Tykwer cuts more than his contemporaries of his time (the golden age of quick cut editing is generally thought to be the 2000s and 2010s in which The Lord of the Rings heavily influenced editing). This fast pacing is in parallel with Lola and Manni’s fast talking, shouting, and throughout the film, her running.
This pacing, and all the elements that go with it (the polaroid-type fast forwards of passers-by, the obstacles that either increase or decrease her run time [the dog in the stairwell, Meyer’s car, the Nuns, etc.], the interruption – or not – of her father’s conversation with his mistress all are very interesting elements to explore. Lola’s physical route across Berlin across intersections, under elevated S-Bahn bridges, and through buildings, is fun to note through the film, but hardly scratches at the metaphysical hammer drops in the film. I’ve always enjoyed the film, and it certainly is a favorite of mine, but until I saw it in 35 on the big screen, it seemingly always eluded me, and I never knew why. This time, I finally saw it.
I noticed two huge, powerful things on the big screen. One should have been obvious from the start, and the other, well, not so much but if I used my brain maybe I could have figured it out. The first one is Franka Potente’s unbelievable performance of Lola. When I first saw this on my 13” Mitsubishi, it was hard to see anything, especially in letterbox. The next format was on DVD on my 35” TV. That was decent. But there is no contemplating her performance until you see it on 35mm. Potente’s performance is dynamic, at times devastating, and completely enthralling. The post-coital scenes in which she and Manni (wonderfully performed by Moritz Bliebtrieu) which divide the ‘runs’ in a red tint, show a slower, more endearing Lola, someone who knows she loves her partner, and as we find, she is touched when he manages as a male to express back this feeling. Potente (born in 1974) is the stand in for her Generation, the dreaded X. In a re-united Germany, she conveys the fear of getting it wrong, the reality of having nothing, and the desperation to save a given situation. Potente does more than just cry at the right moment. She expresses thinly veiled rage at the bank guard (the famous shot of her looking over her shoulder before darting off), wonder at the impossible (winning in the casino), and the terror at having to do what she knows is the wrong thing (shooting a guard). If this were not enough, there is a physicality to the performance masked by the green pants, Doc Martins, constantly exposed bra, and the bright shock of red hair surrounded in a sea of dark grey Berlin. Potente exudes a certain sexiness that pulls you in not because she looks like a Milanese model, but because she does not. She doesn’t run with a midriff, though you can see a tattoo around the top of her belly button and though she is topless in the red tinted scenes, you get no more of her than in any other shot and the mystique of that is what pulls you in. Potente staring into the camera (almost, almost breaking the fourth wall) uses her sexuality to penetrate a viewer’s consciousness so they care about the character instead of being ambivalent. Her physical nature, her emotive skills, and her ability to convey desperation in times of crises is why this film, filled with her face in turmoil, is such a beaming success. Potente makes you love Lola so that you care for her. Because if you don’t care for her, the film is sunk. This is top tier acting.
The second, more pointed element, that I missed was in the casino at the end of a long crane shot that leaves Lola at the cash out booth as we travel up to the clock. You cannot but help see, in 35mm, a painting of a woman on the wall of the casino under the clock with her back turned. The back of her head prominently displays a hair bun, a swirl that for film aficionados will be an unmistakable reference to the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo. There is no other conclusion than to think that Tykwer, who wrote the screenplay, had any other intention than a parallel. This could not have been an homage. Given the plot of Vertigo, this would be impossible. Scotty, a private detective, is hired by Madelein’s husband to shadow his wife because she has been acting strange. Over the course of his duty, he becomes entranced and obsessed with his charge, to the point of neglecting his job. As a result, he is not there to stop her when she commits suicide. Guilt ridden, in a deep depressive state, and somewhat manic, Scotty’s mind becomes unhinged when he sees a woman on the street that looks EXACTLY like his suicide obsession. Given a second chance, he decides to heavily woo the girl as to, in a sense, do things over. He does not want to waste this opportunity because he is so in love. Unfortunately, Stewart does not understand that the suicide was staged, that in fact the real Madelein is dead, murdered by her husband so that he could have the fake Madelein Scotty has been obsessing over. When Scotty realizes this, he confronts the fake and in high drama, she accidentally kills herself.
What is Run Lola Run except the intentional willing to avoid such circumstances? This is more than willpower. This is having the will to supernaturally change things for the better (the scream in the casino is a physical manifestation of this). Having concluded a deal for his mob boss Ronnie, Manni takes the payoff money to meet Lola at a rendezvous, but she is not there (timing has meant her moped was stolen). Hiking to a subway, he fleas when he sees cops and accidentally leaves the money on the train next to a bum. He has to hand over the money to Ronnie in 20 minutes and calls Lola in a panic. His backup plan is to steal the money from a Bolle Supermarket unless Lola can come up with the cash – 100,000 Deutsch Marks – in 20 minutes. Lola runs her ass off to her father to get the money, who tosses her out after saying he’s leaving her mother and unceremoniously admits he is not her real father. Frantic and depressed, Lola is thus late running to Manni whom she interrupts while he is robbing the Bolle. In the escape, she is shot and Manni watches her die, absolutely distraught.
Star crossed lovers have been around since before Romeo and Juliet. What punches through here is Lola looking into the camera and deciding, willing, this to not be the way things end. Breaking the Fourth Wall, but not looking to us the audience but rather to time, the cosmos, or a supreme being, she says “Stopp.” In German, this sounds like “Schtop.” (Do everything you can to avoid the English dub of Lola Rennt. It is beyond a doubt the worst English overdub I have ever heard in my life.) Dissolving into the red tint, we see Lola and Manni discussing why Manni feels like he is in love with Lola. It is this love that is the central core of the film, and the tag line of the movie: “Fast Cash, Crazy Fate, and True Love.” I don’t remember how confused I was when the phone came down... but I got enough of the point. Because her love for Manni was true, Lola had intentionally willed herself another 20 minutes. In an attempt to avoid a horrible fate, Lola picks up when the phone drops (a Kubrickian-like moment from 2001 as it is crosscut with the stolen bag of cash from Bolle) and runs to prevent the catastrophe that has just occurred.
Having cut some time down, Lola confronts her father, who pushes her over the edge. Lola steals the bank guards' gun, heists the bank, and takes the 100K to Manni, who then is distracted by Lola and is thus run over by an ambulance (who we later learn is carrying the bank guard who just had a heart attack). Lola, much calmer this time, has some inherited memories from the previous run. She does not remember the incident with her father (so that is replayed) but she does remember the safety on the gun. (This is also replayed in the X-Files episode Monday when Mulder realizes the bomber is strapped with C4 even though he has no memory of the bomber or the previous ‘Monday.’) In the second red tint break, again with no music, Manni professes his love for Lola, and the intentional willing occurs again. The phone drops, and Lola runs to her father.
Because another banker, Mr. Meyer, has crashed into Ronnie (Manni’s mob boss) twice in the two previous runs, Lola’s father is there when she gets there. But because Lola does not distract Meyer on the street (thus causing the two accidents), Meyer outpaces Lola to the bank and picks up her father for lunch. Lola thus misses her father by seconds and frantically runs after him until she is exhausted. When she opens her eyes, she sees she is outside a casino. Having bet on black 20 (20 being the same number of minutes she has), Lola wins 127,000 Marks which she takes to Manni.
Manni, meanwhile, has tracked down the bum (whom Lola has passed twice and Manni once), gotten the cash back (minus a hundred marks or so, which he can replace easily) and made the handoff to Ronnie. When Lola shows up with the cash, Manni no longer needs it, and the two live (we guess) happily ever after.
Past the spiral we see in the Vertigo re-creation, we see an animation as Lola runs down the stairs re-create the spiral. The film itself is also a spiral, watching Lola go round and round until she makes the right decision. Remember, the film tells us at the beginning that everyone in the film is a criminal of one sort or another. The bike thief. The baby kidnapper. Ronnie. Manni. Her father is refuses to help his family emotionally, her mother incapable of being loyal either. The security guard may be innocent, but the way he teases Lola and looks at her, he gives off the impression of a misogynistic pig. By the third run, only Lola has not committed a crime. She has avoided her fate. She has intentionally willed it to happen. The Vertigo spiral finally stops. If only Scotty had the same will power. And this is why Run Lola Run is special.