Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt)
Full Price Feature (Eigenschaft Des Vollen Preises oder bezahlung voller Preis)
Normally, I shy away from subtitled films because reading them gives me a headache, and I miss so much of the visual portion of the movie. Seeing Life is Beautiful, by midway through, I forgot all about the fact that I was reading the dialogue; and so it is, for the most part, with Run, Lola, Run. I feel I should mention this up front as many people get turned off by foreign films for the very same reason, and I don’t want people to miss this one.
Basically, Lola runs. She is desperate, she has a mission that is time-critical (20 minutes, shot in real time) and she does it more than once. That is all I will say about the plot because it is much more delightful to have the characters tell it. I knew she ran going into the movie (I mean, come on, I did go to elementary school) but I did not know why. The best part is, somehow, writer-director Tom Tykwer makes it interesting, engaging, fascinating. She runs into and past people and we see snippets of their lives. As things change so do their fates, momentarily touched as they are by her presence running by. Lola is a force, a massive force, affecting all those around her unwittingly, yet she is nothing supernatural – she only zigged where she should have zagged and events took their turn from there. I have always been interested in the concept of “what if” and this movie takes “what if” to a new level – in addition to being really different in execution (say, than Sliding Doors) from most films, Run Lola Run also has the bonus of having all kinds of interesting side stories – they whisk by but still register – they are not unimportant, they are only secondary to Lola’s run.
The soundtrack pumps during the majority of the film – I’d say during the action sequences but I would think of them more as dramatic tension sequences with rapid movement. The best thing about the soundtrack is it feels designed to drive the action and not the bottom line, if you get my meaning. Even cooler: Tykwer wrote some of the original music and Franka Potente (Lola) performs some of it! How personal and intense and nifty is that? It is not a student film – it is multimedia and polished and interesting to the eye. I am not sure what city she is in, Berlin or another city, but it’s beautiful and old and she is beautiful and young with a shock of hot red hair and cool pastel casual clothes and the contrast of her immediate desperation running through these old, staid Bavarian streets to this almost-techno driving music is…freakin’ cool. Freakin’ cool (or a less MPAA-friendly version of that opinion) is what I was thinking most of the time. Sometimes the tone abruptly switches, and I’m like, what the – ! But it’s soon clear and I never flagged in my focus. The film forces you to be as focused as she is. I mean that in a good way.
Franka Potente is fabulous – she’s beautiful without being unnatural or inaccessible, kind of a punk without being a freak, and throughout the film she gets put through the emotional paces and always surfaces with a new tack. Her face is, somehow, expressionless much of the time, yet extremely expressive. It’s all in the eyes. She’s got that Anglo Saxon/German Celtic look going on, mixed with the street chic of her tattoos and wild hair – she’s like a weird modern angel flying through the city to…well…do something really important and in a hurry. Moritz Bleibtreu plays her boyfriend, Manni, central to the plot and also put through the paces in this horrible day. He’s oddly handsome but also not unnaturally so – and they make a believable couple no matter what they are engaged in doing.
Basically it’s refreshing and cool – a Black Forest cake of a movie! Run out and catch it – har har har!
