See Lola Run

21st century has everything on the go, MTV and fast food generation are terms already in common usage, sensory and information overload is shrinking our attention span by leaps and bounds upon yard long bounds. People get bored by serious cinema that goes on for three hours and without much fancy cuts, color and whory titillation. We may very well be running the risk of turning into a desensitised specie. No violence is violent enough, no sex scene sexy enough and I am only scratching at the surface here. Then sometime back, when the world wasn't totally enough dependent on the net and mobile phones, Tom Twyker comes up with Run Lola Run.

The title has a ring of urgency to it, so does the film. The film is almost ten years old and hasn't aged a day, maybe except for if Lola and Mani had mobile phones things would have turned out a bit different for them. And that exactly is the whole idea at the crux of the film. All that could have been. The availability of mobile phone apart, the film just makes a point (in 20 minute triplicates) how little insignificant things can have an effect on the outcome of any given situation. They even have a word for it, the butterfly effect. Hollywood went ahead and patented that word for an Ashton Kitchner film (the film's ok but no Donnie Darko to which it is unfairly compared with. But let me get back to it whenever I write up on Butterfly Effect, if ever.) As far as comparisons go Run Lola Run has been compared to some Gwenyth Paltrow film. The musings on chance, little accidents and all is just one aspect of Run Lola Run. The film in itself is a whirlwind force that doesn't let up for its entirety. Never a dull moment.

The film starts with a quote by T.S Eliot and then segues into a philosophical monologue to a breathtaking title sequence and then shoots off to exactly where the action starts. The film is hyperactive and for me I just loved it for that. From the title sequence you know you are going to like the film. The pounding vibrant soundtrack aptly compliments the action on the screen. The story is minimally simple, Lola has to come up with a 100,000 DM (or was it 500,000) in 20 minutes or her boyfriend Manni will die. 20 minutes is not a long stretch of time and the movie already explains Lola's lack of access to any form of transport. So that requires a lot of running. And run Lola does. Out of her apartment, through the streets to the bank her father works in to the phone booth where Manni's waiting for her. A limited amount of settings where the action takes place and a limited amount of timeframe in which the same chain of events unfold.....on paper this can appear to be monotonous and repetitive and we see the same scene three times over where surely enough something goes slightly different eventually leading to separate outcomes.

In between Twyker is smart enough to toss in other tricks that only compliment rather than divert from the main action. Cartoon sequences, life stories of bystanders told in rapid successive stills, magic realist elements such as Lola's ability to shatter glass when she screams (a nod to another German film Tin Drum). All of this makes this film richer rather than making it look crowded and cramped within the film's structure. In summation the film, hate it or like it has an infectious quality to it that rattles with energy and awe of the possibilities cinema provides. What good fun.