Lola Rennt (1998)

Directed by Tom Tykwer. Starring Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup, Armin Rohde, Nina Petri, Ludger Pistor, Joachim Król. [R]

High-energy high concept: sporty, scarlet-haired Potente has twenty minutes to bring her criminal boyfriend 100,000 Deutsch Marks or else he’s a dead man; she inevitably fails, but the film then posits alternate choices and consequences she “replays” again and again, as if life were an arcade game and her pockets were full of quarters. Gimmicky, to be sure, and virtually bereft of meaning, humanity and character, but as a fast-paced, ultra-stylish experiment, it borders on the intoxicating, and doesn’t overstay its welcome (it runs about 80 minutes, and would have suffered greatly even if stretched out to just 90). Tykwer pulls out all the visual stops (jump cuts, whip pans, animated sequences, switches from color to black & white and back again, etc.) but manages to avoid the sort of hyper-caffeinated overkill that assaults the senses instead of excites them. The action is set to a pulsating heartbeat of nearly non-stop electro-trance music. Neatest touch: snapshot montages that show how chance encounters can drastically shape the fates of passersby. Visual references to Raiders of the Lost Ark are claimed to be inadvertent, but they got Indy’s “it belongs in a museum” trademark right—the wig that Potente wore for the part ended up in one in Berlin. Released in the US as Run Lola Run.

78/100