RUN LOLA RUN @ 25

 

Lola Jaeger, 20 something and punky, gets a fevered call from her boyfriend Manni. He's a bagman for a local gangster and he's just finished a job. It went perfectly except for the part where he left the bag bursting with cash on the train. As the homeless guy who helped himself to it strides gleefully away, Manni calls Lola for any ideas at all to get 100K marks in twenty minutes to him before he crosses the road and holds up the supermarket. So, without a clear plan, Lola runs.

So begins the film that conquered the world in 1999, the year when little movies with big ideas beat the odds to carpet the cinematic world. Fight Club, The Matrix, South Park, Being John Malkovich, The Blair Witch Project, the list just stretches out, including this outlying comedy of anxiety from Germany whose big idea was an old one but with an execution as hip and up to date as could be had.

The O. Henry story Roads of Destiny tells of a traveller who chooses different directions on coming to a forked intersection that lead him to different fates made of the same elements. Lola's improvisations while physically on the run feature parallel routes where wildly differing fates await herself, Manni, and people she bumps into while running. From winning lotteries to dying lonely and overdosed, the effects of chance rule the universe. But for a single break in the scheme (hint: gun) Lola has no memory of running the course in other circumstances; this isn't the constant self-improvement of Groundhog Day but rather a blocked system whereby every different iteration of the single action is played without cross reference. That exception is thrown in as a cheeky wrong footing. There's another whereby a character Lola keeps meeting seems to be aware of the other run-throughs (sorry, these puns are compelled).

These different plays are, of course, for the benefit of the audience and we both warn Lola through gritted teeth to avoid this corner or not to run down there in gleeful futility. That we also are fed a massive amount of information about Lola's life and that of the people around her further fuels this effect of our feeling godlike in vision but with no control. That element is left with Lola herself and she doesn't always make the decisions she should. The story is punctuated by her own screams of frustration which rip out at different points in the play-throughs, reminding us of every single time that we felt ourselves caught in knots of malfunction or unwelcome surprise.

The young Franka Potente as Lola, whose squeezed out mop of dayglo hair, cargo pants and army boots were rendered iconic with a look that was a gift to poster art across language and cultural boundaries, holds the electric centre of the film. As the mixed media flashes around her from ugly home video grind to gleamingly perfect 35mm cinematography, she either runs at an Olympic pace or is frozen in rapid thought, as still as a figurine as time and the rest of the world move around her. The few moments of apparent calm where flashbacks to post-coital pillow talk are offered in infernal red light and feature trains of conversation that do not conclude. Manni's shocked chaos on the initial phone call reveals the worst that desperation will push forward. By the time Lola notices the casino our hearts sink but we're so invested we almost yell at her to enter. Add the constant pulse of the EDM electronic score which either throbs beneath the action or rises to a gurgling acceleration of it that  crosses over the frequently frenetic editing and you have a film guaranteed to surprise its viewers that it's only eighty minutes long.

In 1999, if your work made it into a scene from the Simpsons you had not only arrived but were probably influencing costume parties. As Lisa ran along the road to the strident gobbles of techno, everyone knew what those few seconds came from. Run Lola Run is remembered for its action rather than its dialogue but it has bucketloads of talk. Most of this is exposition but we're surprised with each new viewing that we forgot it. One thing that occurred to me this time, though, is technological. This film's events would only be hampered by mobile phones. The phones we see are no longer much in evidence anywhere, rotary diallers and booths. But hand-held communicators would remove Lola's invention, her readiness to meet the crises that pop up like a kinetic obstacle course throughout. This is not just about her superhuman sprint but how long a second is in a human brain. It's also about how fresh the contents of time capsules can appear to us. And fresh it remains.