It’s hard to recreate the cold slap and jolt of adrenalin the German thriller “Run Lola Run” delivered when it sprinted into theaters back in 1998.
Primal right down to its blunt-instrument title — “Lola Rennt” in German — the film’s mashup of animation and live action, a simple narrative repeated by its heroine “until she gets it right.” was pin-you-to-your-seat bracing way back in 1998.
Edited into a heedless blur by writer-director Tom Tykwer in a style that Paul Greengrass would perfect in “Bloody Sunday” and his installments in the “Bourne” series, “Lola’s” influence extended far beyond Tykwer, whose career never delivered anything else remotely as captivating and cinema-shifting.
Viewed anew, it still packs a visceral punch and visual wit, even if the breathlessness with which this 80 minute marvel seems a little winded now. The gimmicks stand out as “gimmicks,” the techno-infected soundtrack seems both just-right but dated and the ever-sprinting Franka Potente never works up a pant or a sweat. Only a blushing hint of glistening, flushed exertion ever breaks through the makeup.
I mean, you or I try running through the streets of Berlin in 20 minute bursts and we’d be shvitzing and gasping, “Wo geht es zur Bierhalle?”
All it takes is a phone call — from a phone booth, in those pre-cell days — for Lola to spring into action.
“I’m done for,” her boyfriend Mannie (Moritz Bleibtreu) whimpers. Thanks to Lola’s bad luck and tardiness he’s botched a diamond smuggling payoff to the mobster who financed his deal. And yes, Mannie’s a little more butch sounding in German than the English-dubbed version.
Lola had her moped — the bane of Europe back then — stolen. She missed picking up Mannie and he lost the sack of cash on the subway. He’s sure to get killed if he can’t deliver.
“I’ll think of something!” Lola blurts as Mannie vows to rob a grocery store right behind the phone booth if she isn’t there in 20.
What she thinks of is hitting up her banker-dad (Herbert Knaup) for the cash. But she bursts in on him as his affair with a bank associate (Nina Petri) is about to go public and end his marriage.
That slows her up enough that she can’t stop Mannie from making a bad situation worse by pulling out a pistol and robbing that store.
So she’ll have to try again. That’s the conceit here, that this magenta-haired icon of European youth Lola runs through scenarios of how this day might go.
She repeats the quest, if only in her head. Maybe this time she won’t almost get hit by a car, she’ll grab that ride from an ambulance, it will or it won’t crash through a long pane of glass that installers walk across the street and Mannie and she will be “saved.”
Bystanders whom she offends or bumps into are hit or avoided, with various flash forward montages showing how these characters’ lives worked out — a Lotto win, wealth and happiness, or an embrace of fundamentalism, an accident that puts a woman in a wheelchair vs. a happy marriage with or without S & M, etc.
Tywker slows the pace to give Lola 360 degree pans as she makes her choices — the bank again, or a casino? Running through a herd of nuns, or around them? He keeps the action on the move with split screens showing Lola and Mannie’s moves and counter moves.
The techno-pop score — that’s Potente singing much of the time, with Tykwer (her then lover/partner) pitching in on the compositon and sythnesized performance — is most interesting when the movie takes a breather from it.
“What a Difference a Day Makes,” Dinah Washington sings, prefiguring the plot of this Eurothriller decades before it came out.
What holds up best over the nearly three decades since “Run Lola Run” came out is the sense of pluck and play. Lola is not to be denied. By hook or by crook she will sprint to the rescue her of man. And Tykwer’s giddy montages, transforming bit players into characters as we see how various fated versions of their lives turn out, is as deliriously fun as it ever was.
Potente never made much of a mark in Hollywood. But fittingly she was in a couple of “Bourne” films, playing Matt Damon’s love interest.
Tykwer’s best post-“Lola” work was for German TV, and the gaudy, sensory-overload big screen period piece “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.”
But every time any movie hurtles by us in a mad rush and madder mashup of styles, genres, comical asides with pace pace pace, “Run Lola Run” lives on, its influence much grander than its box office take or critical acclaim would have you expect.
Rating: R, violence, profanity
Cast: Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu,
Nina Petri, Armin Rohde and Herbert Knaup
Credits: Scripted and directed by Tom Tykwer. A Sony Pictures Classics release on Tubi, other streamers.
Running time: 1:20
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