Run Lola Run

365 Films

Entry #131

Run Lola Run (1999)

Directed by Tom Tykwer

Run Lola Run is an unqualified success for me because of the plain and simple fact that I can’t exactly recall it.  It remains in my mind as fragments or pieces of an incredibly exhilarating and visceral cinematic experience.  I suppose this is by design seeing as how writer-director Tom Tykwer sets up a skeletal, choose your own adventure type only to populate it with all the intricacies of fate, chance, and choice.  Run Lola Run also made an icon (for a brief moment) out of Franka Potente and it is my understanding that such was her good standing in her native Germany that the look of the character became a national trend amongst the women.  All of these attributes add up to a movie that houses such outlandish stylistic tics that they, in effect, become the movie.  Which is not to say that this is another tired exercise in the video game, music video aesthetic but more a potent examination of mainstream Hollywood cinema made by a filmmaker firmly planted outside of the establishment.  The fact that Run Lola Run became the subject of loving homage/spoofing in later films only confirms this fact.  By stripping down the narrative of action cinema to its barest elements, Tykwer gives himself the freedom to explore movement and the inherent consequences that spring forth when movie characters cease to care about the world around them in the mad dash pursuit of their goals.  The result is a dynamic, involving, and gripping piece of suspense cinema peppered with moments that stop to pause the enormity of a life ruled by movement.