Run Lola Run Review
by Cheng-Jih Chen (postmaster AT cjc DOT org)July 8th, 1999
"Run Lola Run" ("Lola Rennt") is the neat little high-energy German film playing in art houses right now. The movie has many pluses, mainly having to do with its energy content and some funny sequences, as well as some neat visual tricks, but it's somewhat less than it first appears.
The film is apparently about how contingency affects and effects the courses of our lives. The basic plot is that Lola's boyfriend Manni needs, in 20 minutes, to come up with 100,000 marks he owes a violent gangster, or else he's dead. She rushes out to save him by coming up with the money, running across Berlin. The same events unfold three times, each time a little different because, apparently, of the circumstances of an encounter she has with a dog on the way down the stairs. Events unfold differently not just for her but also for various people she bumps into along the way. It's the idea of the butterfly effect on human histories.
"Run Lola Run" is full of energy: there are the running scenes of the title as she races from place to place, all accompanied by a good techno soundtrack. There are few pauses. The only ones of length are the interludes between iterations, where the love between Lola and Manni is fleshed out. The movie also has a nice sense of humor, with how several of the random encounters play out. The cartoons were neat, too, and I got to find out how little I remember from my college German classes. But the heart of the movie is about alternative histories.
One trick that's received notice is the alternate histories of the people Lola bumps into on her run. Yes, the point of such divergent histories arising from whether they're bumped into or narrowly avoided is the notion that we're all connected by webs of contingency. A momentary delay because we missed the walk light may hurl our lives off in entirely different paths. Yes, but only in the case of spectacular accidents, both bad (hit by bus) or good (chance first encounter with the love of your life). (I'm under the impression "Sliding Doors" plays thoroughly with this idea of the split second contingency, though I haven't seen the movie. I believe there was also a Kieslowski film about missing a train along these lines.) Generally, the momentum of lives are sufficient so that their trajectories will not be upset by whether someone brushes by you on the sidewalk or clears you by a good foot. These little episodes lack any compelling sense of causality and exist in a flash-lit vacuum of the filmmaker's imaging. Why does the guy on the bike start shooting drugs instead of just saying no, and why would the permutations of his trivial encounter with Lola send him down one path and not the other? The philosophical point about connectedness contained in the film has the lightweight feel of what a bright, young college student spins out in a late night conversation over beer and cigarettes: the apparent heft of the point dissipates in the light of day.
There's Lola's particular situation, where the causal elements that determine how each iteration turns out is given more play. This is more satisfying to watch, but I feel it's less about little contingent circumstances affecting how events unfold, and more about how Lola "solves" the puzzle pieces to make events unfold in the best possible way (for her). The caught-in-temporal-loop episodes from Star Trek do this sort of thing routinely: a certain sequence of actions have to be undertaken before the whole thing is solved, and the Enterprise escapes into next week. And, of course, there's "Groundhog Day".
In some sense, Lola is a less aware version of the Bill Murray character. She knows that events have turned out wrong, and she "corrects" them by force of will and the use of a "play over" button. The interludes between the iterations that show her love of Manni give reason for her using her will in this manner. In a sense, there's no contingency at all: we know Lola is going to succeed in saving Manni and herself.
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