Run Lola Run, directed by Tom Tykwer (1998)
Lola began with a simple image – Tom Tykwer envisioned a film about a determined red-haired woman running through a German city.
Since its release in August 1998, Run Lola Run has become an international cult hit. A pulsating sound track, non-stop action, and a story being told in three different ways, have made it reference-worthy. The Simpsons’ episode “Trilogy of Errors” refers to Lola, as does the pilot of Alias and in the seventh season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a woman with very red hair runs through the streets of Frankfurt in the opening sequence of Beneath You. Lola’s hipness and irreverence are established immediately in the opening sequence with quotations by T.S. Eliot and Sepp Herberger. The modern poet talks about circular time, continuous learning and expanding perspectives. Germany’s soccer hero Herberger, who coached the German national team to win the 1954 world cup, on the other hand simply states: “After the game is before the game”. Time is the main character in Run Lola Run and the rules of the game are quickly established: come up with 100.000 DM in twenty minutes or you lose. After all, the German word Spiel means 'game' and a feature film (or Spielfilm) lasts about ninety minutes.
With a postmodern sense of immediacy, the film pulls the viewer into the present after its ironic juxtaposition of high modernism and postmodernism. Similarly, high and low culture are presented once more when one of the most famous German voices, Hans Paetsch, the German equivalent of James Earl Jones, presents the Big Questions with which Lola plays: “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? How do we know what we believe to know? Why do we believe anything at all? … But in the end, isn't it always the same question and always the same answer?” To which security guard Schuster adds in true Herberger-style before literally kick-starting the film: “A football is round, a game lasts 90 minutes. That's a fact. Anything else is pure theory. And off we go!”
Like the New German Cinema’s rebellion of the early 60s against superficial German films that nobody outside of Germany wanted to see, Run Lola Run grew out of a period of insular German film productions which had followed the success of Doris Dörrie’s Men in the mid-80s and which culminated in the mass-produced comedies directed at the German ‘fun generation’ of the 90s. There had been no major international successes like The Tin Drum (1979) or Das Boot (1981) for a long time, and the biggest hits of the New German Cinema all had strong historical components. Even in recent years, Germany’s biggest film exports have dealt with Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past). One only has to think of Nowhere in Africa, Downfall, or Sophie Scholl: The Final Days all of which deal with the Third Reich: exile and persecution, the battle for Berlin, and youth resistance. One might also add the comedies Sun Alley and Goodbye Lenin! which present the new Vergangenheitsbewältigung of dealing with the East German past.
But when Lola starts running, she does not look back but runs ahead into a postmodern, chaos theory-inspired present. The film presents a new German cinema which can look at the present and into the future without being stuck in the past. Sabine Hake explains its success thus: “With its playful references to popular music, modern fashion, and contemporary lifestyles, Lola Rennt appealed to national and international audiences as the quintessential postmodern film” (in German National Cinema p. 192).
With its youthful music video cuts and its hip factor, Run Lola Run is also a tale of generational conflict and a quest for continuously redefining one’s sense of self. Lola is introduced as a daughter. She lives with her mother who has an affair and spends her days with a telephone in one hand and a drink in the other. Lola doesn’t even bother asking her for the 100.000 DM but instead runs straight to her father. As it turns out, he’s also having an affair and about to leave his family. Parentage and family ties are questioned when he finds out that his new partner is carrying somebody else’s child. It seems that 'Papa', as he is referred to in the title sequence, is having a tough time being a dad. After all, he also tells Lola that he is not her biological father.
