Hubbry Logo
search
logo

Run Lola Run

logo
Community Hub0 Subscribers
Write something...
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
See all
Run Lola Run

Run Lola Run (German: Lola rennt, lit.'Lola Runs') is a 1998 German thriller film written and directed by Tom Tykwer. It follows a woman named Lola (Franka Potente) who needs to obtain 100,000 marks in twenty minutes to save the life of her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu).

Run Lola Run screened at the Venice Film Festival, where it competed for the Golden Lion. Following its release, the film received critical acclaim and several accolades, including the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Film at the Seattle International Film Festival, and seven awards at the German Film Awards. It was also selected as the German entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 71st Academy Awards, though it was not ultimately nominated.

Manni, a bagman responsible for delivering 100,000 marks, frantically calls his girlfriend Lola. Manni says that he was riding the U-Bahn to drop off the money and fled upon seeing ticket inspectors, before realizing that he left the money bag behind; he saw a homeless man examining it as the train pulled away. Manni's boss Ronnie will kill him in 20 minutes unless he has the money, so he is preparing to rob a nearby supermarket to replace the funds. Lola implores Manni to wait for her and decides to ask her father, a bank manager, for help.

Lola runs down the staircase of her apartment building past a man with a dog. At the bank, her father is conversing with his mistress, who discloses her pregnancy. When Lola arrives, her conversation with her father turns into an argument. He tells her that he is leaving her mother and that Lola is not his biological daughter. Lola runs to meet Manni but arrives too late and sees him entering the supermarket with a gun. She helps him steal 100,000 marks but find the place surrounded by police. Surrendering, Manni throws the money bag into the air, which startles a police officer who accidentally shoots Lola dead.

Events restart from the moment Lola leaves the house. This time, the man with the dog trips her, and she runs with a limp and arrives late to the bank, allowing her father's mistress to add that he is not the father of her unborn child. A furious Lola overhears, grabs a security guard's gun, holds her father hostage and robs the bank of 100,000 marks. When police mistake her for a bystander, she is able to leave and meet with Manni in time and stop him from robbing a supermarket, but a speeding ambulance that Lola distracted moments earlier runs him over.

Events begin again. Lola leaps over the man and his dog, arriving at the bank earlier but not triggering an auto accident as she did the first two times. Consequently, her father's customer arrives before her and leaves with her father. Lola wanders aimlessly before entering a casino, where she hands over all her cash and plays roulette with a 100-mark chip. She bets it on the number 20, which wins. Roulette pays 35 to 1, so she wins 3,500 more marks, which she immediately adds to her original chip on 20. The 20 comes up again. She leaves with a bag containing 129,600 marks and runs to Manni's rendezvous. Manni spots the homeless man from the underground train passing by on a bicycle with the money bag. Manni steals back the bag at gunpoint, exchanging his gun. A dishevelled and perspiring Lola arrives to witness Manni handing over the money to Ronnie. As the pair walk along, Manni casually asks Lola about her bag.

The film touches on themes such as free will vs. determinism, the role of chance in people's destiny, and obscure cause-effect relationships. Through brief flash-forward sequences of still images, Lola's fleeting interactions with bystanders are revealed to have surprising and drastic effects on their future lives, serving as concise illustrations of chaos theory's butterfly effect, in which minor, seemingly inconsequential variations in any interaction can blossom into much broader results than is often recognized. The film's exploration of the relationship between chance and conscious intention comes to the foreground in the casino scene, where Lola appears to defy the laws of chance through sheer force of will, improbably making the roulette ball land on her winning number with the help of a glass-shattering scream.

The thematic exploration of free will vs. determinism is made clear from the start. In the film's brief prologue, an unseen narrator asks a series of rhetorical questions that prime the audience to view the film through a metaphysical lens touching on traditional philosophical questions involving determinism vs. philosophic libertarianism as well as epistemology. The theme is reinforced through the repeated appearance of a blind woman who briefly interacts with Manni in each alternative reality, and seems to have supernatural understandings of both the present and potential futures in those realities. The film ultimately seems to favor a compatibilist philosophical view to the free will question as evidenced by the casino scene and by the final telephone booth scene in which the blind woman redirects Manni's attention to a passerby, which enables him to make an important choice near the film's climax.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.