Saturday Film Club #2: Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt)

Director: Tom Tykwer

Country of origin and year of release: Germany, 1998

Much copied, but never bettered: The influence of Run Lola Run, a high octane film born out of the optimism of a recently re-unified Germany and the energy of a burgeoning Berlin techno scene, was everywhere in the years immediately following its release. I can think of at least two US TV shows that intentionally referenced it at the time (one of them was Buffy), and you can also see its influence in the film Go.

The freshness of the narrative structure (our titular heroine has three chances to re-play the days events, and hopefully end up with a resolution that doesn't result in boyfriend Manni's death) works so well because it plays on the audiences sense of 'What if?' 

What if Lola arrived at her fathers bank two minutes later? Giving his lover the time to tell him that the baby isn't his after all?

What if the ambulance doesn't just miss the workmen with that large piece of glass they're carrying across the road?

What if Manni does catch up with the tramp who walked off with the gangsters money?

There's also a real sense of the arbitrary, of malign fate or Murphy's Law: In the first version of the days events, Lola is killed because one of the police officers is distracted by the the trajectory of the bag full of robbery takings, and his gun accidentally goes off. In the second version, Manni isn't killed by a police marksman or a gangster, but by a truck driver when he stops in the middle of the road. Similarly, the films final conclusion doesn't fit the action film genre at all: It's incidental, casual, almost comic. 

There are so many beautiful moments of cinematography here: 

The sly, slow motion homage to Bonnie and Clyde, which is soundtracked by Dinah Washington's 'What A Difference A Day Makes', as these two most unlikely supermarket robbers run away with the takings.

The surreal winning moment in the casino, with Lola's relieved, exuberant scream of victory literally shattering glass.

The moment when the ambulance, finally, hits the large sheet of glass being slowly carried across the road.

The parallel shots of Manni psyching himself up to rob the supermarket as Lola runs towards him.

Franka Potente as Lola and Moritz Bleibtreu as Manni deliver absorbing performances of intensity, vulnerability and uninhibited anger and frustration and, as Bleibtreu pointed out in an interview for this brilliant piece from The Guardian, the film is unusual in its use of an action heroine, not an action hero, working against time to save her man. As Bleitreu points out, the film is a feminist story; Potente's Lola didn't fit the stereotype of the toned action hero (or heroine). She wasn't a runner, she was "smoking two packs a day back then", and she was running through Berlin a pair of Doc Martens. 

Run Lola Run remains a refreshing take on the action genre, but it's charm lies in the fact that there's so much else going on in the film and that, every time you watch it, you get something new from it.