Run, Lola, Run – Review

Run, Lola, Run

with Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup
Directed and written by Tom Tykwer
by Adam Haynes

I’ve been having this problem recently where every time I go to a movie I somehow end up sitting close to the asshole. You know, the one who makes all the noise. Whether it’s the determined woman in wide overalls working her way through two helpings of nachos at The Matrix or the no-neck at The Mummy having to explain all the jokes to his date… I’ve been hearing everything.

My first thought was that this must be happening because of my watching a lot of movies in the newer stadium-style theaters – the ones with the super tweaked acoustics. Must be that not only was I picking up every little blip and whistle on the movie’s soundtrack, but also every fart, whisper, and gulp from my fellow patrons behind me.

To test this hypothesis, I went to see the new hot art-film, Run Lola Run, at a decidedly un-stadium art-house in Santa Monica, and to my surprise, not only was the crowd at this film as loud and irreverent as the ones previously mentioned, they were even worse. Actually made the ‘plex crowd seem like church patrons.It was enough to make me take a step back and ponder – the topic of interest no longer being the irritating noises others make during the movies, but why an art-house crowd behaved even worse than their bottom-feeding cousins.

Here’s the conundrum: the whole presupposition of the art-house crowd is that they’re after film product that has a bit more bite and consequence than the average Hollywood or grind-house genre goods. They’re into films which are more than just ju-ju escapism, films that contain something that the rest of the culture, the majority, isn’t ready for. Something challenging, which then, given this understanding, puts the art-house crowd at the tip of the vanguard of contemporary aesthetics. You’d think this’d place them in a superior position to the majority of the film-going crowd, and thus cause them to act-accordingly, rather than give in to all the spoiled rug-rat posturing I observed.

Run Lola Run, by German director/writer Tom Tykwer, has a plot that sounds like perfect art-film fodder. Lola (Franka Potente, looking like Lilly Taylor on Thorazine) has twenty minutes to get a ton of money to her boyfriend or he’ll get whacked by local gangsters. What supposedly makes this movie new, bold, and special is that we’re led to believe from the previews and hype that the entire film takes place within those twenty minutes. This in turn makes the first thirty or so minutes of the movie really fantastic to watch, because we’re sitting there as the set up unfolds, all the time wondering how the hell the filmmaker is going to deliver.

Lola runs. The techno blares. She passes a clock and sees that she only has ten more minutes. We look at our watches and see that the movie has about sixty more (it’s running time is eighty-something). How is the filmmaker going to do it? What tricks and new techniques are going to be thrown upon us? What post-structural throws of narrative logic? Lola fails at getting the money, arrives a second too late to meet her boyfriend, sees that he’s given up and decided to rob a grocery. What will happen next? Our watches tell us only about forty minutes have passed – what the hell is the filmmaker going to do now? Obviously, he’ll take us somewhere great and challenging and edgy that the rest of the culture can’t currently handle, right?

Wrong. What tricky Teutonic Tom does is end the story, then arbitrarily present two other scenarios in that same twenty minute time span, something which completely destroys the story and detaches us from the experience, turning the film more into an essay than a dramatic narrative. Not that there is anything wrong with film essays, as long as they have some meaning. Then we’re still fine and good, still on that vanguard. But “meaning” is probably the most overwhelming element Run Lola Run flat out lacks since it’s neither interested in its characters (beyond how they get moved around) nor its story. All we’re left with are some fuzzy notions about time. Irritatingly, Lola pretends at various points to be wanting to say something about how fate is not stronger than time, but it’s clear that while Tykwer really is just in it for the music and camera moves, he has ego enough to think the twinkie he’s created is actually cake that he can eat, too. By the quick though laborious end, the experience Tykwer has created is nothing more than an extended set-up masquerading as a picture. All tease – a half-wit director flirting madly with himself.

The fact is that there is absolutely nothing new, different, or challenging about Run Lola Run either in style (limp-wristed Richard Lester) or content. More than anything else, along with other recents like Go and Pie, it plays like the latest transmutation of the Beach Party movies from the sixties. These exploitation films were idealized cotton candy hiccups of their time and place. The new generation, which I shall dub The New Fast Automatic Groove, are just as idealized, trying self-consciously to ride the perceived wave of club-kool and cotton-headed, lollipop nihilism.

Lola proves yet again that most art-films exist only to give the art-house crowd what every movie crowd wants, but with different music and clothes so that they can maintain their feelings of cultural superiority.

What makes Lola particularly interesting is that it can’t even be observed as an exploitation movie since these are ultimately about story (told through excess). There’s so little going on in this film that it has to be regarded more as a slogan, a symbol. No wonder the audience was loving it so much – like having your temple stroked with a warm vibrator; absolutely nothing to assimilate. A commercial with itself as the product. No wonder the art-house crowd talked and made so much noise during the screening. Commercials are more fun than anything else precisely because it’s okay to talk and do other things during them. Everyone knows that, or at least everyone who’s cool.