The Runaround

Want some extra credit? Here's an analysis of Run Lola Run. Give it a read, and then check back in with me at the end.

Movie Maid

Crissa-Jean Chappell. Film Comment. New York: Sep/Oct 1999. Vol. 35, Iss. 5; pg. 4, 1 pgs.  Copyright Film Society of Lincoln Center Sep/Oct 1999.

"Do YOU LOVE ME?" Lola wants to know. Her dim-witted boyfriend better mumble the correct response, because she's about to save his life. For twenty minutes, Lola (upcomer Franka Potente) will barrel her way across Berlin, searching for quick cash while an incessant techno beat blares in the background. German director-writer-musician Tom Tykwer opens his 81-minute musing on choice and chance with a quote from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." A pixilated blur of people bustle against the suburban landscape, never seeming to notice one another. The mockserious voiceover broods about man, "the most mysterious species on our planet." What is the human race? Where did it come from? Of course, these questions are posed by human beings, the only group capable of wondering ... or answering.

Some have chastised Run Lola Run for assuming "arthouse" pretensions, as if foreign films must always cater to the intellectual - or resort to self-indulgent navelgazing - because that's what stuffy Germans do, according to close-minded critics. Because the 34-year-old Tykwer makes use of a self-composed electronic score ("youth music") and accentuates visual gags to an exaggerated degree (including jump cuts, quick edits, instant replay, slo-mo, montage, and animation), he mustn't have anything to say. He's having too much fun.

Maybe this kneejerk response is true of recent overseas fare - Britain's Lock, Stock. and Two Smoking Barrels, Denmark's highly overrated Celebration, Austria's Funny Games - that garnered attention for nonconventional cinematography and narrative (without being half as intriguing as the UK's Trainspotting or our own Pulp Fiction). These films fashioned themselves as groundbreaking. Actually, they had more in common with Hollywood action pics or "pop" music, carefully composed to manipulate an audience response - base-level "shock value."

Lola's slim, what-if? plot, though hardly new (its strategies having been explored as long ago as the French New Wave, e.g., Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad), has tacked some modern spins on the old existential question concerning destiny (does it exist?), not just in terms of tricky camerawork or a cute, nonlinear reorganization of events, but a hidden subtext that speaks to a particular generation of disillusioned, rising middle-class kids who refuse to look backward.

Examine the token people who surround young Lola. There's Papa, wheeling and dealing in a high-power exec position, secretly unhappy with his destiny despite a fawning mistress and a comfortable income. There's Mama, sitting in front of a television that features a cartoon rendering of her punky, flame-haired daughter racing down the apartment stairs. Not that she'd notice - she's too busy talking astrology on the phone. Then, most interestingly, there are the nameless passersby who slam into Lola as she gallops against the clock: a bike-pedaling boy, a mean-spirited woman pushing a baby carriage. Tykwer hilariously flashforwards (three times) into distinct futures that alter whenever Lola whizzes past. One person is struck by cancer; another wins a lottery. It almost seems that Lola's flight is changing their course of history. Could something so simple create that enormous an impact? This smacks a little of Chaos Theory, the butterfly's demise in Australia that could cause a stock market collapse on Wall Street. It's an evocative idea: that every innocent choice, no matter how insignificant, can ignite a chain reaction of possible consequences.

The hypersurrealist setting, modem Berlin, worships tradition even as it heralds the fashionable and unorthodox. See Lola run smack into an ominous flock of nuns. As they part to allow her passage, we behold their black-and-white habits, their blank expressions aimed at Lola, the postmodern woman with a male movie hero's mission. Check out her crazy green gingham pants, the lacy bra peeking beneath her sweat-rimmed tank top, the Gothic tattoos on her muscular skin. This is - and isn't - our world, hints the director (who lends Lola the power to shatter glass with her high-pitched scream). This is our world through his epileptic camera ... and makes no claim to deny it. In fact, he accentuates it. We can't deny we're watching a movie. We, like Lola, are made of movies.

Is it even worth asking: Can we classify this mix of sound and image as a motion picture? Or is Lola a video game? (Not until the audience can control, as well as choose, the outcome. Which could happen very soon.) Is Lola a feature-length music. video? (Are music videos minimovies? In some cases, yes. Same with commercial; that tell a story.) If Lola is a movie, which genre applies? It contains elements of road movies, lovers-on-the-run, gangster robberies, and most obviously, action, one of the oldest movie formats (and the most stylized, a la Buster Keaton). Tykwer plays with action movie staples, like men crossing the street with a pane of glass. His world has its own rules and logic, layered over a foundation of cinematic reference. The old and new collide to create something that contains a little of both.

Lola might be a movie about movies one in which the protagonist evolves a kind of eerie sentience to alter her fate outside the godlike director's hands. In the animated stair sequence, Lola passes a nasty neighbor with a dog. The first time, she trips. The second time, she leaps over his leg. She also grows bolder in her approach to Papa - to the point where she develops an almost untroubled attitude: brandishing a gun and barking orders with the calm of someone who knows everything will be okay in the end. "I don't want to go," her thoughts sigh during a death sequence. So Tykwer backs up and gives her another chance to get it right ... until the resolution Lola trulv deserves is a happy one. In a world where our own existence is touted as accidental, could a movie character hope for more?

Crissa-Jean Chappell, film critic for the Miami Sun Post, is pursuing a Ph.D. in film theory at the University of Miami.

Mr. Cowlin here again. First, Crissa-Jean Chappell asks several questions:

1. Can we classify this mix of sound and image as a motion picture? Or is Lola a video game?
2. Is Lola a feature-length music video?
3. If Lola is a movie, which genre applies?

Answer a question for extra credit. Post it below. Answer two for more credit.