Movies
Run Lola Run (1998, Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtrau)
As the excellent 24 has shown, real-time drama still has its place, but Kiefer Sutherland’s antics find their direct descendant in this wonderful German thriller placing an athletic redhead in a live-or-die struggle.
She is Lola (Franka Potente), a pretty young petty criminal who, at 11:40am, answers the phone in her Berlin apartment. It’s her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), who has botched a job smuggling diamonds for a psychotic gangster, leaving the money on a subway train. If Lola doesn’t get to him by noon with the same sum of money, Manni will be killed. She sets off toward him, and three contrasting timelines follow, in which success, failure, death and life converge to determine their fate…
From The Killing to Pulp Fiction, choreographed chaos is one of cinema’s best illusions, and Tom Tykwer’s contribution is pure visual amphetamine. Like Kubrick and Tarantino, the German director has an implicit disregard for linear narrative, preferring to drip-feed tension and augment his characters through laconic film-making (no surprise, then, that he cites The French Connection and Bullitt as major influences).
Lola’s plight is compelling almost from the first frame thanks to the elegant visual mnemonics (led by Lola’s striking red hair), the switch between 35mm and video, and Potente’s robotic, hypnotic quest to alter the future. ‘I wanted the sheer, unadorned pleasure of speed. A wild chase with consequences,’ said Tykwer, who utilises one stereotypical Teutonic quality – making things run on time – to produce another, rarely mentioned German skill: humanity.
His film may feel like a video game but it’s a world ahead of Tomb Raider and may be a landmark as film moves toward digital production and full interactivity. See it before the inevitable Hollywood remake, as they’ve already poached Potente, whose career appears to have repeated timelines as she starred opposite Matt Damon in the race-against-time thriller The Bourne Identity.
production details
Germany | 81 minutes | 1998
Writer and Director: Tom Tykwer
cast
Franka Potente as Lola
Moritz Bleibtreu as Manni
Herbert Knaup as Lola’s Father
Nina Petri as Frau Hansen
Armin Rohde as Herr Schuster
Joachim Król as Homeless Man
Ludger Pistor as Herr Meier
Suzanne von Borsody as Frau Jäger
Sebastian Schipper as Mike
Julia Lindig as Doris
Lars Rudolph as Herr Kruse
Andreas Petri as Cleaning Person
Klaus Müller as Croupier
Utz Krause as Casino Manager
Beate Finckh as Casino-Kassiererin (uncredited)
Volkhart Buff as Ambulance Driver
Heino Ferch as Ronnie
Ute Lubosch as Mother
Dora Raddy as Old Woman
Monica Bleibtreu as Blind Woman
Peter Pauli as Wachmann Supermarkt (uncredited)
Marc Bischoff as Polizist (uncredited)
Hans Paetsch as Erzähler (voice) (uncredited)
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