Run Lola Run (1998)

Lola rennt (German)

Run Lola Run

There are a few movies which deserve constant attention of the viewers; otherwise the viewer will not be able to understand it fully, for example ‘Inception’, you took a phone call in between the movie for 5 minutes and boom, you start wondering what happened. And than there are others that warrant the imagination of the viewers or else the viewer will be lost again.

Run Lola Run belongs to the later category, the director wants the viewer to imagine and just believe. And why is that required is for a simple reason, the movie plays the same events 3 times. It’s just like ‘what-if’ scenarios, what would have happened if something in past would have been done in a slightly different way; surely it would have impacted the present and the future.

The movie starts with a phone call received by Lola, ‘Sammy’ her boyfriend is on the other side, he is a small time criminal, and whose attempt to climb up in the crime hierarchy had gone terribly wrong. He now owes 1,00,000.00 Marks (German currency) to some pretty bad criminals and he needs it in the next 20 minutes, or else as a back up plan he intends to rob a nearby super market. That leaves Lola with twin objectives to achieve, she needs to arrange that kind of money and reach his boyfriend as well in the next twenty minutes.

She starts running immediately with intention to ask his father for money, and while on the way she interacts with a few people, and you can see that even those people are shown to have different future outcomes in all the three scenarios. What changes from one scenario to another is the speed with which Lola runs, like on first time she runs at the normal speed, next time due a mischief by a neighbor she falls on the stairs, so she is a bit slow this time, and in the last act she is shown to have a faster start to her sprint.

Due to the change in pace the interaction with different characters and situations are changed considerably, which impacts the conclusion of the story every time.

The movie is fast paced as you may have guessed by now; even the length of the movie is just 81 minutes. However an attempt to remake it in Bollywood went south when some very talented people like Rahul Bose and Nandita Das starred in Ek Din 24 Ghante, this movie was plain pathetic for lack of a worse word. However the original one deserves a watch.

Rating ***