Symbols: Red
The color red is commonly used as a symbol in film and literature. In Run Lola Run, red is used to symbolize danger and death. Not only does the film use red, it uses an intense, vivid shade of the brightest red. We are easily able to see the color on different objects as it stands out and catches our eye as we watch.
The first time we see the color red, it is the phone that Lola answers in her apartment. Sitting in the middle of the room, the bright red phone seems to be the bearer of bad news - news of danger and death. After Lola answers the phone, we realize that we were correct as Manni gives her the disastrous news.
Red is used several other times in.....
Motifs
Journey
Lola Rennt is a journey story. Journeys are often used in literature and film to show the changes in a character's attitudes and life over time. Unlike many journey stories, Lola is not simply out to find a new place to live or running away from her past; she is trying to save her boyfriend's life.
Lola's boyfriend, Manni, has made some mistakes that may cost him his life. Because Lola was late to meet him, Manni blames his problems on her. She agrees to find an answer to his problem within the hour. Lola races out of their building and begins a journey to save his life, and on the way, she uncovers some new parts of herself and secrets about her family.
1-Opening Sequence
TASK A
Try to think about what these quotes mean in relation to the film and the way it is constructed. Do they give any clues as to how the film will turn out? How does our impression of the film alter from seeing these quotes?
Although the opening sequence does not give any details as to the narrative of 'Run Lola Run', it does refer to the themes of the film.
"After the game is over, the game begins" ....
TASK B
How does the opening sequence of 'Run Lola Run' relate to the rest of the film? What information is communicated in the opening sequence?
Compare it to the opening sequence of a Hollywood film that you are familiar with. In what ways are they different?
Opening sequences give the audience an initial impression of characters and plot, thereby
generating audience expectations. What were your expectations after viewing the opening
sequence? Did the film meet these expectations?
Chance, Chaos, Coincidence "Run Lola Run" is troubled by them.
Run Lola Run
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
-- T.S.Eliot, Little Gidding
Every time I watch Run Lola Run, I inevitably find myself comparing it to the O. Henry short story Roads of Destiny . "Roads of Destiny" tracks the fate of a young shepherd called David (no relation to this guy) who decides one day to leave behind his sheep and make his career in poetry. He sets out for the city and promptly loses his way, arriving at the intersection of two major roads with nary a clue as to what direction to take. O. Henry uses this device to tell three different tales of what would have happened had David gone down each of three different paths. While it would be sinful to give away too much more, it is not much of a spoiler to state that the story is an ode to determinacy; O. Henry wants to establish the inevitability of destiny, as David is magnetically pulled towards exactly the same fate in each of the three scenarios.
Tom Tykwer's "Run Lola Run" has a remarkably similar conceit. Lola needs to get a-hold of 100,000 marks (the movie pre-dates the Euro by a couple of years) in 20 minutes in order to save her boyfriend, Manni, from near-certain death at the hands of the bad guys. What we receive is three alternative versions of those 20 minutes, event sequences starting out identically but diverging quickly into three different realities on the basis of Lola's trifling encounter with a dog on a stair.
However, this is where all resemblances, coincidental or otherwise, between O. Henry and Tom Tykwer end. While O. Henry is interested in demonstrating the convergence of alternative realities to the same eventual fate, Tykwer is studying the exact opposite -- the exponentially fast divergence of realities from near-identical initial states. O. Henry paints a world ruled by implacable classical determinism, unswayed by the idle efforts of human free will to distract it from its predetermined destination; Tykwer, on the other hand, thrives in a post-modern, chaotic universe swayed mightily by every flap of a butterfly's wings, held at ransom by the influential repercussions of the apparently inconsequential.
As exciting as all this thematic structure may be, the real strength of "Run Lola Run" as a movie lies in the inventiveness of its storytelling. As Roger Ebert eloquently puts it, Tom Tykwer ``throws every trick in the book at us, then the book, and then himself''. The film is a visual marvel, right from its magnificent opening scene with an aerial shot of a crowd forming the movie title, to its clever use of film stock to separate the main characters from the rest, and interleaved photo montages of tens of pictures that are , naturally, worth tens of thousands of words. Oh, and if that is not enough, there are also freeze frames, jump cuts indebted to 2001: A Space Odyssey , and even some animation thrown into the ring.
The techno soundtrack of the film is a perfect complement to the explosive energy of the visuals. Tom Tykwer, who is also a pretty accomplished musician, composes much of the music for the film, and has even contributed a song to one of the Matrix sequels. (The song is better than the sequel, although that isn't saying much.) Franka Potente, who, as you might have guessed, spends a lot of time running through Berlin streets with flaming hair bobbing all over the place, did manage to retain enough of her breath to provide the vocals for the song accompanying most of her athletic pursuits.
"Run Lola Run" is a smart movie that demands active and attentive watching in order to piece together all the subtle causal connections among various events. I suspect it likes to think that it poses deeper existential questions worthy of greater thought, steeped as the beginning segment is in rhetoric and T. S. Eliot. Personally, I never quite figured out why the Eliot quote had that much to do with the rest of the movie. Not that it affected my enjoyment of it in any way. As they say, the ball is round, and the movie lasts 81 minutes. Anything else is merely hypothetical.
OPENING QUOTE
About the narrator in the first sequence, Hans Paetsch.
In the first sequence of the film, we hear a voice-over by Hans Paetsch, which talks of the questionssearching for an answer.
Hans Paetsch is a, if not the German voice for the telling of fairytales. His voice can be heard on innumberable tapes with fairytales, and it is quite certain that most Germans between the age of 20 and 40 listened to this warm voice at some time during their childhood.
This has an effect on the perception of the whole film, because it creates an atmosphere that immediately indicates: This film tells a story or maybe even a fairytale, in any case it is something that does not claim to be absolutely realistic but something that is a narration/ a fictitious story.
'Mankind, probably the most mysterious species on our planet. A mystery of open questions. 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?
'Innumerable questions looking for an answer, an answer which will raise the next question and the following answer will raise a following question and so on and so forth.
'But in the end, isn't it always the same question and always the same answer?'
Security guard Schuster: 'A football is round, a game lasts 90 minutes. That's for sure. Anything else is merely hypothetical. Off we go!'
Why does Lola scream that much?
Her screams are one of her characteristics, a typical sign, as it were: Every time things become tense and it seems like the chaos is near, Lola tries to gain control of the chaos by means of screaming (by releasing the pressure, as it were). An example can be found at the beginning of the film: Manni doesn't listen to her and she starts screaming, so that he is quiet and listens to what she has to say. Another example can be found in the office of Lola's father (First Run). She screams just like someone who wants to stop the noise of a group of people who all talk at the same time to make them listen.
The casino sequence intensifies her tension: After missing her father at the bank, this one decisive round of roulette is literally a matter of (Manni's) life and death: If it is not "20, black", she won't get the DM 100.000 and Manni's life is lost.
In that way, her screaming is not just a poor gag to shock the establishment at the casino (which indeed would have been ridiculous), but, quite on the contrary, it is a reappearing theme in the film: everytime the chaos is haunting Lola, she tries to influence the chaos /fate by the power of screaming.
The theme of chance and choices in film:
The theme of the "what if" question has appeared quite often in film:
· In Sliding Doors, director Peter Howitt shows two possibilities of how main protagonist Helen's (Gwyneth Paltrow) life could look like.
· And an upset film critic exclaimed that no one had pointed out that in 1981 already, Krzysztof Kieslowski let his main protagonist Witek live through three episodes of his life in Przypadek (Blind Chance).
I would like to point out that I hereby have pointed this out.
· The theme of a period of time that repeats itself throughout a film with slight alterations is used in Groundhog Day as well.
Where does the opening T.S. Eliot quote come from?
The quote is the German version of the fifth stanza of T.S. Eliot's poem Little Gidding.
The original text of this quote is:
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
Synopsis
When Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), a young man who works for a brutal gangster, loses a huge amount of money on a subway train, he calls his girlfriend Lola (Franka Potente) and pleads with her to save him. Running through the streets of Berlin, she sets out to ask her father, an affluent banker, for help and, if she can get any cash from him, to deliver it to Manni, who is afraid his boss will kill him. The events ensuing from Manni's desperate telephone call to Lola are related in three different versions by the director, each of which, because of the various accidents that befall the characters and the choices they make, has a different outcome.
Analysis
Driven by a vibrant, pulsating soundtrack that imbues the title character's dash through the streets of Berlin with a frenetic energy, Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run is a clever, wonderfully fun, and consistently exciting film. The director has created a delightful protagonist who is both physically and personally captivating and placed her in a story that is both meditative and overflowing with a thrilling sense of adventure.
Tykwer infuses Run Lola Run with such a potent feeling of dangerous exhilaration that the viewer is left nearly intoxicated by the sight of the heroine's desperate efforts to save the life of her boyfriend. Fortunately, this sense is consistently enhanced by his protagonist, who is a simple but fascinating and involving character. The director has wisely avoided burdening his movie with extraneous details about her life and instead focuses exclusively on what will assist in the production of the feelings of exciting anxiety which dominate the film. He reveals her wealthy background, her lazy days as a rebellious, unemployed youth, and, most importantly, her passionate love for Manni. The viewer is, consequently, able to enter into her world and feel her desperation as she rushes to help her lover. Not only does Tykwer reveal enough of Lola's life to make her genuinely engaging, however, but he has also made her so visually appealing that the moviegoer cannot keep himself from being drawn to the character. With her brilliantly red hair, dishevelled clothes, and tattooed stomach, she is such a delight to watch that the viewer will hardly be able to look away from her.
While the movie generally remains focused on this captivating individual as she hurtles along one street or another, down a flight of stairs, or through some building, Tykwer enriches her tale by momentarily moving away from her when she encounters certain other persons, showing, in brief sequences, each of which is composed of a series of still images, the futures of these individuals, which change in each story depending upon apparently minor differences in the circumstances of their encounters with the protagonist.
This concern with how seemingly inconsequential incidents affect his characters' lives, how such occurrences can radically alter subsequent events, is effectively used to structure the whole of the film's narrative. There are times when the changes do seem forced, but these are relatively few and do not greatly detract from the movie's quality. Generally, the viewer is intrigued, even fascinated, by how the subtly distinct occurrences depicted lead to radically different futures both for Lola and the various people with whom she comes into contact.
Tykwer's observations are, by and large, undoubtedly true. Our lives are, in fact, frequently determined by events that occur in the briefest of moments, or by some single decision we have made, or even by chances over which we have no control. There is, probably, hardly a person alive who has not wondered how different his life would have been had it not been for some apparently trivial incident. By bringing out these possibilities, the director imbues the movie with a real sense of meditative fun.