106.4Abstract (summary)
Lola's lover Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), a diamond smuggler, has left a bag containing 100,000 Deutschmarks on the subway, the same bag his gangster boss expects him to deliver in 20 minutes. Not the coolest of gunsels, Manni panicked when he saw transit inspectors board the train. A wandering derelict is now in possession of the swag. Manni phones Lola, weeping and angry, because if he can't produce the money, gangster Ronni will kill him. [Lola] has 20 minutes to find 100,000 marks or her lover will either rob the supermarket across from the phone booth or get snuffed by Ronni -- at high noon, of course. Lola has always claimed that love can solve any problem; Manni virtually dares her to save him.
Tykwer's ending involves additional irony. For one thing, her final situation is less than stable because it rests upon her remaining oblivious to her father's detachment. More importantly, her happy ending does not strengthen her bond with Manni so much as release her from it. With 100,000 marks of her own, Lola finally arrives at the intersection where she was to meet her man. It seems a crossroads for her life. When he finally arrives in Ronni's black limo, [Tom Tykwer] intercuts Manni's swaggering approach with Lola's stolid look, which is hard, sober, and appraising. "What's in the bag?" Manni asks her, but the film's freeze-frame end precludes her telling him. Manni has no idea of what his Lola has gone through for him -- not to mention the tripled ordeal that we have witnessed. Between Manni's vain complacency and Lola's intense commitment there is a chasm that we can assume she will no longer abide. Now, with her character proved, and his exposed, and with her considerable security, she can leave their unequal relationship and -- yet again -- write her own future.
Some destinies are ineluctable. In the first two versions, Lola encounters a car driven by her father's friend, Herr Meier (Ludger Pistor). In the first two, because he is distracted by Lola, he collides with a car driven by three vengeful toughs. In the third, she passes him earlier so he avoids the crash and proceeds to pick up her father at the bank. Given the intertwining of our fates, this means that her father leaves his office before his mistress can reveal her pregnancy, her unwillingness to continue their secret affair any longer, and the additional disclosure that he is not the father of her child. But Meier does not escape the collision with that carload of toughs altogether. When Manni chases the bagman on a bike -- the bike's adventures being three stories in themselves -- several cars collide. This collision seems to kill both Meier and Lola's father. In context this completes the happy ending. Lola is spared the disillusionment of learning of her illegitimacy and his infidelity, and her alcoholic mother is free to pursue her affair with the married person she's on the phone with when Lola begins her run.
Fate and timing have played lead roles in the cinematic work of directors from Chaplin to Hitchcock to Kubrick. And occasionally, as in the case of popular fantasies like Sliding Doors or Back to the Future, we are allowed to marvel at how the course of our lives might be hugely altered by missing a subway train or simply spending a second looking one way instead of another. But regardless of the genre, time and fate have always been firmly in charge -- until now. In a joltingly powerful three-strand story, a young German director hits us thrice with an extraordinary twenty minutes of life-or-death desperation. Punker princess Lola is no Marlene Dietrich, but nobody pushes her around -- not even time, fate, or death.
The new film Run Lola Run, by 34-year-old German Tom Tykwer, is rather more than the kinetic thriller that at first pulse excites its audience. In fact, this film seems to establish the voice of the post-Fassbinder film generation in Germany. For Fassbinder, Schlondorff, von Trotta, inter alia, the necessity of German film was to confront their nation's repressed history. Tykwer's breakthrough film, his third feature, presents a narrative that exposes the mechanism of rewriting a story -- whether history or fiction -- and restores the primacy of the individual will and the need to discover one's individual destiny. The film's striking concept is to play out three alternative versions of a story. This is not the Rashomon-iac revelation of conflicting versions of one event. Even more radically, Tykwer's device exercises the desire to change one's life -- whether in narrative or in reality -- until it comes out right. Run Lola Run -- or in its more declarative original title, Lola Rennt -- is a contemporary individualist's Triumph of the Will.
Tykwer's Lola (Franka Potente) is an emphatic antithesis to the horde of Lolas, Lulus, and Lilis that stud the classic German film. Where they are usually languidly ornamental blonde femmes fatales who destroy their adoring gulls, this Lola is a flaming redhead with a wiry, muscular build and facial features that are homey, just short of homely. With her astonishing stamina and will she saves her undeserving lover's hide. Far from being the object of her man's love/lust, she makes herself the determining force in both of their lives. Although Lola, like the classic German film goddesses, provides for scenes of breathtaking physical beauty, they are shots of her running full-tilt through the city streets, not posed behind glamour gauze or preening on a nightclub stage. Lola's single costume is a militant pale blue t-shirt, pale green slacks, with black belt and army boots. If there's a boa in her closet it must be a tamed snake. There's even a hint of Eartha Kitt's Lola in the bank security guard's taunt: "It isn't your day today. You can't have everything."
Lola's lover Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), a diamond smuggler, has left a bag containing 100,000 Deutschmarks on the subway, the same bag his gangster boss expects him to deliver in 20 minutes. Not the coolest of gunsels, Manni panicked when he saw transit inspectors board the train. A wandering derelict is now in possession of the swag. Manni phones Lola, weeping and angry, because if he can't produce the money, gangster Ronni will kill him. Lola has 20 minutes to find 100,000 marks or her lover will either rob the supermarket across from the phone booth or get snuffed by Ronni -- at high noon, of course. Lola has always claimed that love can solve any problem; Manni virtually dares her to save him.
Tykwer then provides three successive versions of what happens. In the first version Lola arrives too late to prevent Manni from robbing the supermarket, and finds herself a participant in his holdup. While the soundtrack reminds us "What a Difference a Day Makes," the lovers are trapped by the surrounding police. When Lola spontaneously throws the bag of stolen money up in the air, a nervous young cop fires his pistol, and she finds herself on the pavement with her life seeping away.
In a red-tinted flashback to a post-coital conversation, Lola questions Manni about the seriousness of his love for her and admits she doesn't know whether she wants to stay with him or not. On the pavement, a flicker away from death, Lola summons up her intense desire not to leave. By sheer force of will she abruptly finds herself at the starting point of her 20-minute run -- not just reliving her life but rewriting the narrative.
The initial pivot in the narrative is presented as an animated cartoon, first seen on her mother's TV set, then full-screen. This inset genre points to the artifice of the film's construction. In the first version, the cartoon Lola runs past an apartment urchin with his snarling dog. In the second, the urchin trips her, she falls down the stairs, then limps on, falling a few seconds behind the initial chronology. In the third she leaps over the dog and gains a few seconds. And the few seconds of difference either way make for hugely different outcomes.
In the second version the desperate Lola robs the bank in which her father (Herbert Knaup) works; mistaken for a mere "girl" bystander, she is pulled aside to safety by the ingenuous army of police outside, and arrives on time with the money, only to see Manni run down and killed by a red ambulance. This time, as Manni lies on the pavement, the red flashback returns to the lovers' bed, where Manni speculates that Lola would replace him if he were to die. "You're not dead yet," Lola reminds him. And a second time her will renews the narrative.
The third version provides the happy ending that romantic film-viewers crave. A screeching truck stops Lola in front of a casino, and she follows the path of fate, digging every mark out of her pockets and making her way to the roulette wheel, as the affluent casino crowd looks on in consternation. In two plays she wins the 100,000 marks she needs, using her ferocious will to drop the roulette ball exactly where she must have it. Meanwhile, fate is finally playing into Manni's hand, as a blind woman delays him in the street so that his eyes are finally where they must be if he is to catch sight of the passing bagman in possession of Ronni's money. So Manni retrieves the loot, and Lola arrives with her new-won riches. Moreover, in this version she is spared the disillusionment of her father's adultery, his decision to leave his family, and his conviction that he is not her true father (the revelations she suffered in the first two versions). By rewriting her story twice, Lola manages to arrive at the perfect happy ending.
Of course, only in fiction can such a happy ending be assured. For salvation in a casino is not a likely prospect. To emphasize the artifice in the happy resolution, Tykwer has the casino wall feature an improbable portrait of a woman with precisely the rear-swirl hairdo in which Kim Novak found her "Carlotta" in Vertigo. In so transparently labouring for a happy ending, Tykwer points to the romantic imperative of commercial film, even as he deploys the experimental structure and expressive liberties of art cinema.
Tykwer's ending involves additional irony. For one thing, her final situation is less than stable because it rests upon her remaining oblivious to her father's detachment. More importantly, her happy ending does not strengthen her bond with Manni so much as release her from it. With 100,000 marks of her own, Lola finally arrives at the intersection where she was to meet her man. It seems a crossroads for her life. When he finally arrives in Ronni's black limo, Tykwer intercuts Manni's swaggering approach with Lola's stolid look, which is hard, sober, and appraising. "What's in the bag?" Manni asks her, but the film's freeze-frame end precludes her telling him. Manni has no idea of what his Lola has gone through for him -- not to mention the tripled ordeal that we have witnessed. Between Manni's vain complacency and Lola's intense commitment there is a chasm that we can assume she will no longer abide. Now, with her character proved, and his exposed, and with her considerable security, she can leave their unequal relationship and -- yet again -- write her own future.
In each of the rewrites that we witness, Lola encounters the same minor characters en route, but in different ways. These small differences result in dramatically different consequences not just for herself but for the people she encounters. As if to demonstrate chaos theory, there is usually no clear relationship between the difference in their exchange and what happens to the other characters. For example, Lola bumps into, brushes past, then runs cleanly past a woman wheeling her baby down the street. Those slight differences lead to radically different destinies: the woman has her baby kidnapped, the woman wins a lottery, the woman converts to evangelism and dies. Disdainful of human justice, destiny best rewards her (the lottery) for her worst display of character (swearing at our Lola). So, too, the woman she brushes past in the bank. In the first version she goes on to kill herself after a car accident. In the second she ends up in a sadomasochistic affair with the mousey teller. As Lola doesn't enter the bank in the third version we can leave the woman in that latter destiny.
The flash-forwards of these minor characters' lives serve a second function in the film's exposure of narrative device. They remind us that people live fuller lives than we witness when they serve secondary roles in our fictions. In most narrative the supporting figures pass quickly through with very limited revelation, for they are framed out by the narrator's focus elsewhere. This film dramatizes the caprice of choice both in history and in other fictions.
Some destinies are ineluctable. In the first two versions, Lola encounters a car driven by her father's friend, Herr Meier (Ludger Pistor). In the first two, because he is distracted by Lola, he collides with a car driven by three vengeful toughs. In the third, she passes him earlier so he avoids the crash and proceeds to pick up her father at the bank. Given the intertwining of our fates, this means that her father leaves his office before his mistress can reveal her pregnancy, her unwillingness to continue their secret affair any longer, and the additional disclosure that he is not the father of her child. But Meier does not escape the collision with that carload of toughs altogether. When Manni chases the bagman on a bike -- the bike's adventures being three stories in themselves -- several cars collide. This collision seems to kill both Meier and Lola's father. In context this completes the happy ending. Lola is spared the disillusionment of learning of her illegitimacy and his infidelity, and her alcoholic mother is free to pursue her affair with the married person she's on the phone with when Lola begins her run.
Against that background of infidelities, betrayals, and shallow relationships, Lola's single-minded and total dedication to her impossible mission is a bracing idealism. In each version she expresses the strength of her will with a literally glass-breaking shriek. In the first it's in her apartment, out of frustration at Manni's helpless blithering. In the second it's in her father's office, enraged at his betrayal. The third is the most constructive, in the seat of chaos and chance; at the casino her scream seems to will the ball into the black-20 slot on which she has staked everything.
Against this background of dishonesty -- Lola had her moped stolen when she stopped to buy cigarettes; gangsters Manni and Ronni are elaborations upon the bike thief and the opportunistic bagman -- Lola discovers new dimensions to her generosity. For instance, she would rob her father's bank to keep Manni from robbing the supermarket. In the perfect third version, when she leaps into the back of the passing ambulance in order to get to Manni quicker, she finds the bank's porcine security guard apparently dying of a heart attack. When she holds his hand warmly, his condition stabilizes. After his bitter teasing in the first two versions, the third reveals his suppressed desire, when he playfully suggests that she has come to see him. Ironically, he has his heart attack after her uneventful visit. Not in the first story -- when he is ordered to throw her out -- nor in the second -- when she steals his gun, holds it to her father's head, and robs the bank. Destiny is like that.
As for the ambulance, in the first version it simply passes her and stops safely before a large pane of glass being carried across the road. In the second, the driver refuses to give her a lift -- and (we faithfully hope as a consequence) smashes the glass, then kills Manni. In the third, Lola's simply hopping aboard gives the ambulance its most satisfactory conclusion as well.
Several visual metaphors encapsulate the film's central concerns. In the opening image, the camera pretends that we are swallowed up by a gargoyle clock with speeding hands. In the opening sequence, individual citizens stand in clear focus amid a street full of blurred traffic. One character tells us that man is "probably the most dangerous creature on our planet" -- among other reasons, perhaps, for his ability to rewrite history. Another speaks of life as a series of questions to which the answers only pose further questions. To avoid these complexities, the security guard reduces his concern to a definition of football. He kicks a soccer ball in the air, following which the camera sees the people in the street move into the letters that spell Lola's name. In several later aerial shots -- the town square, the casino floor -- the rushing character will be shown within a graphic pattern of which she cannot be aware. This is an image for the various destinies we discover only by living them. But as Lola runs along a path, she is effectively choosing her destiny, her participation in the pattern that she cannot see from our perspective. In contrast to the intervention of individual will, a passing TV show reveals an elaborate sequence of arranged dominoes, falling in mindless and inevitable order.
Lola refuses to let history or other plot conventions determine her future. In her third and triumphant version she brooks no opposition. She wills the casino cashier to give her the chips even though she is short of the required funds and improperly dressed. She wills the bouncer to allow her one last play. Lola refuses the tragic or comic pattern that is summarized by the woman's description of the casino (read: Life): "You buy chips and you gamble them away." Like the new young Germany, Lola won't take loss for an answer. Undaunted by the weight of the past, the corruption around her, and a discouraging future, she strives and then re-strives until she gets what she wants. But then Tom Tykwer's Lola is lucky. Unlike most of us, she's living in a brilliant post-modernist fiction.
Word count: 2558
Copyright Queen's Quarterly Winter 1999
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