Second thoughts and regrets race through your head even as you read these words. Your inner life stops for nothing. Don't try to deny it.
The mind is a limitless expanse of coulda-shoulda-woulda. What if I had done one thing differently? Something petty, minuscule? Then she might have loved me for all time. Then Mom might understand where I went right. Then life would be...
Only different. Tom Tykwer's "Run Lola Run" lets these thoughts percolate under the sleek surfaces of its exhilarating cosmic bubblegum. This is a movie in which everything that seems hackneyed in contemporary visual style is nouvelle again - a phalanx of apparent rock video and video-game techniques, applied to a story that's sketched-in outlaw couple stuff: a pair of healthy, good-looking young bohos with a sense of style and tattoos are trying to eke out a marginal city existence. They have a few mistakes yet to make, not only in the rest of their life, but also in the next twenty minutes of their lives. It's a luscious paradox: a profound cartoon, an excuse for a fairytale of truest, maddest love that takes the form of a Road Runner cartoon as directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski.
The self-taught 34-year-old Berliner's third feature is a romantic-action-comedy-thriller floating atop an impatient electronica score, playing out three possible narratives of what the streets of Berlin will reveal in the minutes before noon on one fine May day for mid-twenties lovers Lola (Franka Potente) and Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu). Manni loses $40,000 belonging to his gangster boss, which he must replace within twenty minutes. Lola races across the city to find some way to save Manni, herself, their love. A neat twist on "The Bicycle Thief," it's a plotline of essential banality, if that's all you want to see, yet there is a wealth of flagrant implication. But the surfaces entice, suggesting Eadward Muybridge's pre-cinema motion studies, in which human and animal activity was broken down into a series of stills for study. Start with Lola, tattooed, in trim tank top and lime sherbet pants, then her hair trailing behind her, cartoony tousles of vermilion-flame spun sugar, tendrils of canary trailing behind like comic-strip speed-streaks.
"Lola" is also a city symphony displaying great generosity of time and space (except to her uncaring parents, a subplot I haven't bothered to decipher). Lola tears across a Berlin as hyper-determined as cities in silent films such as "Sunrise," but there's also the rush of seeing characters in a plausible, detailed urban setting, such as in "The American Friend" and "When the Cat's Away."
Jean-Luc Godard once offered the glib provocation that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, but Tykwer needs only Franka Potente. There's a gun here, too, but Potente's performance is propulsive motion, a bullet from a gun. Lola's locomotive stride is not Potente's own, as she crabs her ordinary woman's form into pistoning patterns. She insisted on not working out beforehand so her low-slung gait would reveal "a real woman's ass" as she speeds along streets in heavy Doc Marten boots.
"I wish I was a heartbeat, I wish I was a hurricane. I wish I were a hunter, in search of different things," Potente murmurs in a song underscoring much of the film, and Tykwer's film, which grossed more than $15 million in Europe, is a "different thing" from music video altogether. Tykwer is an ardent, self-taught cinephile, a onetime projectionist who learned structure seeing films out of sequence and repeatedly, a different discipline than the linear gaining of levels in a video game sequence. (He also made television documentaries on the work of Von Trier, Greenaway and Wenders.)
There's a line between banality and universality that sometimes finds the viewer (or critic) imposing more meaning on a thing than is truly there. The intense but cheerful Tykwer agrees in his sweetly accented English. "With any kind of art, you always start from a very complicated way. 'Oh my God it's so complicated to tell what I want to tell!'" He sees this as "an over-estimation of your own capacities!"
"Run Lola Run" is a way of getting past that. "It's always like, 'Oh my God it's too complex, it's so incredibly interesting that I will never succeed to bring it all to the film.' The longer you work on it, the more that you find that the good ways to express all this complicated stuff, the closer you get, the more simple you get. The more simple, as with good art, with sculpture, painting, it's very often that you come to very simple things that are still so complex and fascinating."
The structure of "Lola" frightened some potential backers. "The whole concept is so high-concept that I had lots of meetings with people who said, OK, it's a nice idea, but what else is there? I said, okay, I'm not the one to tell you, but I feel that this is my most complex film. I've only done three, but by far, this is the densest. In my movie 'Wintersleepers,' in the very beginning you immediately know there are lots of levels but you immediately know it is not going to be easy."
"Lola" is more subversive. "Here, you are invited to join something that seems easy to join, it's playing a game. While you're watching this film, I hope it feels like a nice rollercoaster ride, but it leaves you with a giant mountain of inspiration. These [financiers] would say, 'Okay, it's a fun film, but go on and do films like you did before.' Sometimes people think there has to be a sign that says, okay, here's my complex structure and you feel safe with the film. If the film doesn't say so, comes along very easily, there is already a doubt, it's suspicious: this film can't be really interesting or intelligent."
The movie's eighty-one-minute running time is also a welcome return to old traditions. "Oh, yeah. It's a very tight idea," Tykwer says. "It should feel like a strong idea that catches your brain, gives you an injection then you're left alone with it. I wanted to leave that impression, not so much that you were completely lost in some epic experience of a film. I wanted it to be more of an inspirational blow to the brain."
In "Lola," the music - co-composed by Tykwer - works as a kind of murmur and a pulse; an inner voice and a heartbeat. "It was back-and-forth from editing to music studio. I wanted to it to feel like a completely one-unit experience. It's all intertwined and the music, sound, visuals, like opera. One opera piece in three acts. That's why it's three acts."
Opera was always called the art that could encompass all other arts, and there's a German word for it, gesamtkunstwerk, which Tykwer does not shy from. "I still of course have this idea of film as gesamtkunstwerk, the approach is always there to combine everything under one roof and it fits together and doesn't feel overloaded. That's my problem with Greenaway, I can always see the guy behind the curtain being so proud with all his toys he can present. That was always frustrating to hear 'Lola' was just a big video clip, just because it used visual methods that are completely normal to us now and works in the present tense doesn't mean that I'm just trying to imitate advertisement noises."
But "Lola" is more about the opportunities that arise at each split-second, each second thought in any our heads. Tykwer leans into the thought as deftly as Lola. "This is what 'Lola' is about. The general idea, and very specifically, I am completely fascinated by this very banal thought. If you take it really so serious as I secretly do, you have to be aware of every, every, every moment, y'know. You have this responsibility for every moment. What we are doing at this moment may mean you're not hit by the shuttle bus outside. But at least you can't prove it's not true. All I'm doing from now on is strongly connected to our meeting. Forever. Until I die. Everything is influenced by the smallest situation. It's a very controversial thought. If everything is important, nothing is important. But on the other hand, I don't believe that. You have to challenge coincidence and there is a path to take. All odds are against Lola, and at the end, it shows it's not by chance that she changes fate, it's really her passionate, possessive desire to change the system that she is stuck in."
It comes back to the original title in German, "Lola Rennt." Like movies move, Lola runs. As the lyric says that runs throughout the movie, "I don't know if love is true, but I can't think of anything more true."
"Run Lola Run" starts Friday at the Music Box
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.