Out of focus? No, it’s she’s going so fast!
A driving beat and a woman running like mad. This is how to take the audience’s mind off the primary question in Run, Lola, Run (1998), which is just why is the lead character jumping back in time? As the primary plot mechanism, this is an important question, but we need some context to understand it.
Manni and Lola are low level criminals looking to move up in the world, and to that end Manni takes on the task of transporting some illegal funds from one group to another. Frightened by the police on the subway, he inadvertently leaves the money behind, and cannot find it at the next subway stop. Now he’s on the phone with Lola in total despair, certain he’ll be summarily executed for losing the money – and contemplating taking the risk of knocking over a supermarket to cover his sizable mistake.
Lola’s task? To gather up $100,000 while running across town in 20 minutes.
Skipping all the details, she’s late and barges in on Manni’s robbery, helps him finish it, and then is shot and fatally injured by the police.
And then she finds herself at the starting line again, as it were. How? We don’t really know. And, truthfully, we don’t care all that much, because this is a frenetic plot with gestural dead-ends designed to activate the imagination that hurries us along from detail to detail behind her flying heels, from her father of dubious morals to a man who just can’t stop having variants of the same car accident over and over to the man who is her partner and her lover – and fairly incompetent in that angry, self-hating way.
Add in the industrial music, some fairly insipid dialog, and a good supporting cast, and I could watch Lola run again. But it doesn’t answer the question of why, not only the concrete why, but the thematic why – why make this movie? Is it a sophisticated exercise in adrenaline rushes? I know I was not inclined to stop the movie to say, Hey … wait. Her drive, her running, throwing herself into the task, is so infectious that we forgive the unexplained. And trying to explain it may lead to weak analogies with the butterfly effect and Gleick’s Chaos.
So sit back and enjoy it. The dialog’s a bit primitive, but the visuals are intriguing and the story is just fine. And don’t make my mistake of trying to figure it all out at the end.
