Run Lola Run

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

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You will be out of breath after watching “Run Lola Run,” the 1998 German thriller written and directed by Tom Tykwer.

For its 25th anniversary, Sony Pictures Classics is sending a beautiful 4K restoration of “Run Lola Run” to theaters. You can see it playing this week at the Tropic Cinema.

As the title implies, a woman named Lola (Franka Potente) does a lot of running in this story about her trying to come up with 100,000 Deutschmarks in 20 minutes to save the life of her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), a race against the clock to replace a drug dealer’s bag of money that he lost.

The film is a prime example of that phrase “déjà vu all over again.”

The tale of this determined redhead’s dash through the streets of Berlin is told … and retold … and retold – each time with a slightly different result. Whether it’s her encounter with a man walking a dog or a confrontation with her banker father or Manni’s robbery of a supermarket, we get a different outcome each time.

In the film, Lola’s run is repeated three times with a different outcome in each, “leaving viewers to ponder such weighty concepts of free will versus fate.”

Tykwer gave the film “both a philosophical underpinning and a relentless narrative drive.” It explores the role of chance in people’s destiny. The various outcomes show the chaos theory’s Butterfly Effect in action.

Franka Potente still complains about having to dye her hair. “My hair had been jet-black from my previous job, so they bleached it eight times,” she says, shaking her head slightly. But as the Associated Press observed: “Franka Potente’s electric locks in ‘Run Lola Run’ are as intrinsic to the adrenaline rush of her sprint through Berlin as the film’s heart-racing electronic score.”

“I didn’t do any preparation really,” Potente admits. “I was probably smoking two packs of cigarettes a day at that point. And I was doing all this running – I was running in rehearsals, I was running when we shot all the different takes, and I would run again so we could get the sound right. I was carried along by all this energy.”

“Run Lola Run” won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and accolades at other festivals around the world.

Since “Lola,” both Potente and Tykwer have gained international success. Potente’s starring roles have included “Blow,” “The Bourne Identity” and “Che.” Tykwer has directed “Cloud Atlas” and the TV series “Sense8” with his frequent collaborators, the Wachowskis. (They became friends due to the similar themes of “Run Lola Run” and “The Matrix.”)

Tykwer says, “You have to remember it was a small, super independently financed film. It got lots of head-scratching from those people who brought money in, like ‘it starts three times, that doesn’t make a movie.’ One of the things I loved was that it seemed like an action movie, but with a strong emotional center and quite a lot of structural and philosophical substance underneath.”

He adds, “It was a nerdy, quirky movie that we only made because we loved making it. We were really innocent kids. Maybe that’s part of the beauty and the energy of the film and why it’s so delightful. I could never do it now. I’m not that person anymore unfortunately.”

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com