How Run Lola Run changed the world

Sunday, 2 June 2024

Moritz Bleibtreu, left, and Franka Potente in Run Lola Run.

Graeme Tuckett is a film and television reviewer for The Post and Sunday Star-Times.

OPINION: We always remember the music, art and films that rebooted our appreciation of the medium. I still know where I was and who I was with the first time I heard Public Enemy, Massive Attack and The Pixies. I will never forget the jolt of rounding a corner in a gallery and seeing my first Basquiat. And - if Wellington's Paramount Theatre still existed - I reckon I could still point out the seat where I first watched Run Lola Run.

Run Lola Run reached us in 1999. The film had been released in its native Germany the year before and caused a sensation. In Australia and New Zealand it was about to become a festival smash that would spill into the mainstream.

Lola is a young woman in Berlin. Her boyfriend Manni calls in a panic. Manni is a courier for a local hoodlum who has one job to do. But, Manni has left a bag of cash on a train and now he has 20 minutes to come up with 100,000 deutschmarks, or he's dead. Can Lola help?

This same scenario plays out three times, unfolding differently in each telling, with split seconds being the separation between triumph and disaster. We see Lola beg her bank-manager father for money, rob a bank, cause car-crashes, get shot, witness Manni's death and finally, we maybe see her live happily ever after with a bag of cash and a mostly intact boyfriend. And, like the title says, Lola runs. A lot.

Writer and director Tom Tykwer was shamelessly influenced by Krzysztof Kieślowski's Blind Chance, which had been released in 1987 after being suppressed by the Polish government for years. Like Lola, Blind Chance shows three outcomes for the same event. But unlike Lola, Blind Chance doesn't have a banging techno soundtrack, great clothes, a madly kinetic shooting style and an absolutely irrepressible lead actor.

As Lola, Franka Potente carries the film. She is in nearly every frame, most of the dialogue is hers and her commitment is sometimes the only thing stopping Run Lola Run from imploding into a messy heap of pretension and failed ideas.

As Lola, Franka Potente carries the film, writes Graeme Tuckett.

Hollywood took notice. Within a couple of years Potente was starring in Blow opposite Johnny Depp, and The Bourne Identity with Matt Damon.

When Run Lola Run turned up in our cinemas, it was unlike anything we had seen before. There was a plot, characters and story-telling happening, but people still jumped out of their seats and started dancing as the film played. Run Lola Run brought the fun of a kids cartoon to an adult film, and critics and audiences loved it. The New York Times even described Run Lola Run as 'post-human', which, 25 years later, I'm still trying to unpack.

Like Groundhog Day a few years earlier, Run Lola Run messed with our ideas of reality and brought a decent discussion of free will versus determinism crashing into the worlds of pop culture and mainstream movie-making. You can see the influence of Run Lola Run all over everything from Crank to The Edge of Tomorrow, while the flat-out exuberance and coolness of the film would inspire a generation to pick up a camera and have a go.

Run Lola Run is a 1998 German experimental thriller film written and directed by Tom Tykwer.

Even if you didn't want to make films, suddenly dyeing your hair cherry-red and getting a few tattoos also started to look like a valid lifestyle choice that more than a few of us were willing to have a lash at. I still have the ink, if not the hair, to prove it.

And now, 25 years after it shook up our worlds a wee bit, Run Lola Run is back in a whizzy new 4K restoration and getting screenings in cinemas up and down the motu. In Wellington and Christchurch at least, you should get a chance to see this millennial gem the way it should be seen. And if you live elsewhere, maybe hassle your local cinema owner into finding a copy.