Run Lola Run was both written and directed by Tom Tykwer. It is an innovative and dynamic film generally reminiscent of music videos in its stylistic approach. After reading ten or so reviews of Run Lola Run written by some of the top professional reviewers in America, I am fully prepared to nominate this film as the most consistently misunderstood film in recent years! Apparently Lola’s frantic running and the driving rhythm of the soundtrack gets viewers so generally pumped up that all thinking is suspended. Lola running is certainly candy for the eyes and I suppose that all those bouncing body parts explain why a lot of blood isn’t reaching the cerebral cortex for the mostly male critics. (Before any Epinionators take offense at my admittedly snooty comments, here, let me state flatly that I referring only to professional critics associated with newspapers around the country, not the good folks here at Epinions.) Run Lola Run is a kinetic meditation on order and chaos – not simply an ode to chance. Let’s start at the beginning and see why.

The Opening Sequence: The opening sequence begins with a quotation from T.S. Elliot. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been told that good speaking or writing technique requires that you start with something that is essential to your message and that immediately engages your readers or listeners because it’s the one moment when you can be certain to have their full attention. Why then would a critic believe the following? “Run Lola Run begins with two weighty quotes, one of them from the last of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding.’ I didn’t quite catch what is said – the person seated in front of me decided to stretch at that point – but I can’t believe it has any serious bearing on what follows. I take it to be a quintessentially Germanic reflex gesture claiming some sort of significance.” Isn’t it more likely that the film director would select opening lines that lay out some aspect of his proposition? Here are those opening lines:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

This is about the exploration that takes place in thought – the exploration that goes no place but which culminates in the understanding (or “knowing”) of the places where we already are. Then there is this second quotation offered immediately thereafter.

After the game is before the game.

This quote comes from a soccer coach named Sepp Herberger. What does it mean? Well we know that coaches of sports teams are not in the business of telling their teams that whether they win or lose is all a matter of change and random events. No, coaches give pep talks that aim at convincing their teams that they control their own destiny. Coaches want their teams to believe that the work that they put into practice and on the field will pay off over the long run. What the above quote means is that once a game is completed, there is no point dwelling on it – win or lose. It is time to begin preparing for the next game. If you stay focused on the will to win rather than hanging your head, you can ultimately achieve a pretty fair share of your goals. With that kind of introduction to the film, why would a reviewer conclude that this is a film “about random chance?”

Next we see a close-up shot of legs and torsos in a crowd or people, moving about chaotically – like the random motion of molecules. The camera than shifts to an aerial view of the crowd as it spells out the name of the film. Order has formed out of chaos. The human will can impose order on chaos. We are not simply helplessly buffeted about by random events.

The Plot Set-up: Lola (Franka Potente) is a young woman in her twenties with a punk look and blazing tomato-red hair. She gets a frantic call from her boyfriend Manni (Mortiz Bleibtreu), who is trying to make some money as a small time bagman for local mobsters. He has screwed up royally. When Lola didn’t show up at a designated meeting place to pick him up (her moped had been stolen), he took the subway instead, carrying a bag with 100,000 deutsche marks (equal to about $60,000) in mob money from a drug sale. When two cops boarded the subway, Manni had gotten rattled and had gotten off the subway leaving the money bag behind! He must deliver the money to one of the mobsters in 20 minutes and fully expects that he will be killed if he shows up without it or doesn’t show up at all. He suspects that the money bag was picked up by a bum who was sitting next to him on the subway. Manni is beside himself with reproach, both for Lola and for himself. In desperation, he screams at Lola over the phone, “You said, ‘Love can do everything.’” Once again, Tykwer is emphasizing in these carefully chosen lines a message that events can be controlled where there is enough will (motivated by love, in this case) to do so! We then see a quick shot of a tortoise making its way across the floor. Tortoises epitomize slow progress through steady determination.

Lola desperately searches through her mind (which we see as a series of visual images) for a plan that can save Manni. After a few seconds, she settles on her father as the most likely option. He works in a bank and has access to the kind of money that will be required to save Manni’s life. She tosses the phone in the air and darts out of the apartment before the phone can even land, races down the stairs (animatedly, literally), and begins running frantically to the bank where her father works. Run Lola Run! Her Raggedy Ann hair streams behind her as she pumps her arms in her green tank top and green-checkered slacks. She is an athletic runner with a tattoo on her belly showing beneath the bottom of the tank top. She is a blur of kinetic energy in nonstop motion.

The story, beginning with the phone flying through the air, is repeated three time over the course of the film with subtle changes in circumstances that alter the outcomes, but certain basic situations recur in all three versions with small but influential alterations. A man on the stairwell of her apartment either does or does not trip her. Lola passes a lady carrying a baby and either does or does not run into her. Mr. Meyer, an associate of her father, is pulling his car out from an alleyway that Lola must cross and she either does or does not slide over his hood which causes him to either have or not have an accident with an on-coming vehicle. When she gets to the bank, her father is at one stage or another of a crucial conversation with his mistress, a bank colleague. After leaving the bank, Lola actually runs right past the bum who has Manni’s money without knowing it. She runs past a guy on a bike each time, but the interactions between them differ slightly. She runs along side an ambulance, which does or does not hit a sheet of plate glass being carried across the street. The three recurrences of the story represent alternative courses that the events of Lola’s twenty minute sprint might follow. Specific details change but it is equally important to recognize that Lola encountered the ambulance – the last event in the sequence before reaching Manni’s location – all three times. While the earlier events changed some of what followed, some also remained the same each time.

There are interludes sandwiched between the three repetitions of Lola’s run. These interludes are not simply filler, as one critic suggested: “to allow us to catch our breath and to deepen our sympathy for these two intensely likable characters.” These interludes provide the basis for understanding the meaning of each repetition. When a critic states, as one did, “There are these scenes between the mini-movies in which Lola and Manni are lying in bed, which I couldn’t figure out”, he has basically simply given up on understanding the film. In these two interludes, Manni and Lola are lying quietly together in soft lighting in bed talking intimately about their feelings for one another. When the first interlude occurs, we have just finished watching Lola’s first run which turned out badly for her. Significantly, it is Lola who expresses existential angst (uncertainty about her attachment to Manny) during the first interlude. She asks, “Do you love me.” He says, “Sure I do.” She suggests, “It could be some other girl.” He replies, “Uh, uh.” [Manni may not be smart about how he makes his money and who he associates with, but he’s no idiot about how to answer his woman’s insecurities!] She asks, “How do you know?” He replies, “I just do!” She says, “What if you never met me?” He replies, “My heart says, ‘Hi Manni, she’s the one.’” She concludes, “Manni, you aren’t taking me seriously. I think I have to make a decision.” Now the second run begins, with Lola having realized that she’ll need to commit to Manni if their love is to be for keeps.

The second run-through of the recurrent story ends poorly for Manni. The ensuing interlude, significantly, now deals with Manni’s existential angst instead of Lola’s. It is he who is uncertain about their love.

Manni: “Lola, what would you do if I died?”
Lola: “I wouldn’t let you die.”
Manni: “Yeah, well, what if I were fatally ill?”
Lola: “I’d find a way.”
Manni: What if I were in a coma and the doc said, “One more day?”
Lola: “I’d throw you into the ocean as shock therapy.”
Manni: “What if I were dead anyway?”
Lola: “What do you want to hear?”
Manni: “Come on. Tell me.”
Lola: “I’d go to the isle of Rügen and cast your ashes to the wind.”
Manni: “And then?”
Lola: “I don’t know. It’s a stupid question.”
Manni: “I know what you’d do. You’d forget me.
Lola: “No.” . . . “You haven’t died yet.”

Lola’s doubts were addressed in the first interlude; Manni’s in the second. Now we’ll see what love can accomplish when both are confident in that love. Now, the third run-through begins. It is not three random alternatives that Tykwer is illustrating. It’s three alternatives that follow from three different states of the love relationship between these two individuals.

Production Values: The filming techniques used for Run Lola Run represent just about every tactic in the cinematographers arsenal. There are speedups and slow-motion, animation, color and black and white (for flashbacks), ten second snapshot series illustrating how the lives of incidental characters are changed through their contact with Lola, and very effective use of split screens near the end of each of the three repetitions of Lola’s run. Lola herself is shot from every conceivable angle. She is not only eye-candy, but a mixed assortment.

Almost as important to this film is the dynamic soundtrack. It features driving techno rhythms that remind us that the clock is ticking on Manni and Lola as well as some lovely romantic songs lyrics, like, What a difference a day makes, twenty-four little hours. There is some deep organ music when harmony is reestablished at the end of the third run.

The unusual form of this film placed little demand on the actors, but Potente is fully effective as Lola. Since there is precious little dialogue, she has to communicate mainly via her facial expressions and provides an impressive range.

Themes: Now, to get to the heart of the matter, this film is NOT merely articulating the butterfly effect, as so many critics believe. For anyone not already familiar with the concept, the notion of the butterfly effect is the theory of a butterfly flapping its wings in Malaysia ultimately causing a hurricane in Trinidad. One critic claims that this film “Illustrates how the smallest change in what a person does can alter the rest of their life (not to mention the lives of others, including complete strangers they pass on the street).” That’s only half of the message of this film and the less central half to boot. If the courses of our lives were as easily and so monumentally redirected in unforeseeable ways by each little decision we made, second by second, what would be the point of striving, commitment to goals or ideals, or committing to one another in love relationships? One would have to conclude as one reviewer does that “each of us has precious little input into the cosmic crapshoot that determines our futures.” Or, as another says, the film would be illustrating “a world where anything can happen and where, as a consequence, nothing matters.” What this film is actually illustrating is that life is a complex interaction between chance and order. Chance adds uncertainty to the direction of events, but order is imposed by a number of factors, including the human will.

Tykwer illustrates several factors that impose order on chaos. One is the concept of equifinality. Not familiar with the term? It is, in a sense, the dead opposite of the idea of the butterfly effect. Suppose, you’re driving down a city street that has multiple stop lights every quarter mile or so. You’re approaching a green light and hoping that it doesn’t turn red before you can get through the intersection. Bad luck, it does and you have to stop at the front of the line. You’re thinking to yourself, as the next minute ticks by, “If only I had gotten through the light, I’d be a half mile further down the road by now and my whole life from here on out would be different.” The light finally turns and you amble down the street and, lo and behold, you find yourself catching up to the same car that you were behind before you stopped at the last light. You’re right back where you would have been anyway! The alternative courses of event have coincided, at least with respect to your present physical location. In Run Lola Run, Tykwer illustrates this point through the device of having Lola come across some of the same people and circumstances in all three renditions, regardless of the fact that earlier events had changed. Equifinality applies to an even greater extent for more influential events. If Edison had never been born, would the world be without light bulbs today? No, it’s highly likely that light bulbs would have been invented by another person, even if it might have been a few years later. Light bulbs were, in a sense, an inevitable discovery at that stage in the evolution of science – give or take a few years. Systems such as the human body, the human nervous system, and sociological systems operate in such a way that certain outcomes will occur even if a few variables are tweaked. Systems compensate for changes in the influences on that system, at least within a certain range of such influences.

Then, secondly, order is imposed on chaos – to an extent – by human will. People like Lola and Manni and the rest of us are capable of a wide variety of behaviors that serve a range of needs at different levels. Some of our behaviors are related to our basic drives for food, fluid, and sex. At the highest level, some of our most purposeful behaviors are driven by our values, such as love, or our goals, such as winning a soccer match. By the choices we make and the behaviors that support those choices, we can overcome the randomness of chance events to some extent. Not entirely, but to a certain degree. The best soccer team can probably expect to beat the worst soccer team in its league nine times out of ten. If the worst team gets especially lucky on a particular day, the better team may find that chance events have overwhelmed their purposeful effort on that particular occasion, but purposeful effort can provide a hedge against bad luck chance events most of the time. This film is also not about reincarnation, as one writer suggests. It is about the incarnation of human will in each one of us.

One reviewer says of Run Lola Run that “You can essentially pick your own ending”, meaning that each viewer can pick from the three alternatives, but that Tykwer has presented them as equally likely alternatives in a universal dice game. No, it’s Lola and Manni who are determining which outcome occurs by the extent of their commitment to one another. This is made abundantly clear by the opening and the interludes. The more fully a team is committed to winning the more often it will win. Manny and Lola win in the last iteration of the story because they had each committed to their relationship and to doing whatever is required to keep that relationship intact. Consider these lyrics from the soundtrack:

Never, never, never, never letting go
Never giving up
Never saying no
Just go, go
Never stop and never think
And do, do, do, do the right thing.

Or consider the following lyrics and then try to tell me that this film is not about the will to exert order over chaos, motivated by love.

I wanna go I wanna fight
I wanna rush I wanna run
I wanna see you again
Under the setting sun
We will kiss we will laugh
We will be a part
Of what is said to be a union of the heart.

In the last rendition of the story, as Lola stands outside her father’s bank as her father and Mr. Meyer drive away, the soundtrack substitutes heartbeats for the clock-like rhythm that has dominated all along. Love conquers all; even chance to an extent! Lola’s love for Manni refortifies her will to find a solution.

For those who are religious (I’m not), Run Lola Run could also be interpreted as suggesting another way in which order is imposed on chaos – God’s will. As Lola runs from the bank, we clearly hear Lola’s thoughts, “What can I do? Help me, please. Just this once. I’m waiting.” At that moment a truck almost hits her, forcing her to stop and to spot the casino. Now, I don’t personally believe that a god in heaven concerns himself with who does and doesn’t win in the casinos and I don’t believe that religions encourage their faithful to pray for personal gain. But, for what it's worth, it is another example that Tykwer has built into the film by which order might be imposed on chance. Lola, whose voice can shatter glass, apparently also shatters the barrier between the physical universe and the spiritual domain to reach the levers of predetermination. That’s Tykwer’s view – not mine.

Bottom-Line: When it was initially released, Run Lola Run was all the rage at the film festival circuit, first in Toronto in 1998 and later at the Sundance Film Festival in 1999. It has a running time (literally) of 81 minutes. It is rated R (for some violence and foul language) and is in German with English subtitles. The lasting image that one takes away from viewing the film is, of course, Lola in high gear. It’s a pity that more people don’t take an interest in actually understanding what the film is about.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Germany:

The American Friend
Beyond Silence
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
The Blue Angel
Das Boot
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Dr. Mabuse the Gambler
Fitzcarraldo
Kings of the Road
M
The Marriage of Maria Braun
Metropolis
The Nasty Girl
Nosferatu
Pandora's Box
Stalingrad
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
Threepenny Opera
The Tin Drum
Wings of Desire
Zentropa

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Good Date Movie
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age