The Runner Stumbles

Run Lola Run

Dir: Tom Tykwer

R, 81 min.

Now showing at Green Hills Commons 16

Rap videos tend to have a standard design: The artist sits in opulent rooms, surrounded by bodyguards and scantily clad women, while his enemies hover in helicopters and the setting sun casts a golden glow across the sky. Other video genres have motifs too. Teen hunks thrive on cameras that circle a round stage; post-grunge artists use dark, dusty sets (to match their dark, dusty singers). And if you watch MTV late at night, you might catch a techno video and be momentarily taken with that house style—time-lapse photography of nature, intercut with industrial films and pieces of news footage, all digitally manipulated and edited to the beat.

The hot German movie Run Lola Run has been intentionally crafted by writer-director Tom Tykwer to play like 75 minutes of MTV’s Total Request Live. The plot is post-grunge meets rap, as a grubby waif named Lola (Franka Potente) rushes to find 100,000 deutschmarks and get it to her gangster boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) before either his bosses arrive to rub him out or he takes matters into his own hands. For this slight tale, Tykwer employs a style heavy on circling cameras, sudden zooms, and jump cuts, with accents of animation, time-lapse, still photographs, and filtered lenses.

The central gimmick is that Lola has 20 minutes to complete her task, and Tykwer shows us three possible paths that Lola might take. Each time she rushes out the door, a series of obstacles either slows her or speeds her just enough that the rest of her trip is altered, and not only her fate but the fate of others is permanently affected (at least until Lola’s next theoretical attempt). The overriding gimmick, though, is Tykwer’s eclectic style. He’s out to exhilarate, and he uses a cluster-bomb of cinematic techniques to give the audience a visceral rush.

One could argue, though, that Tykwer pushes our buttons to keep us from seeing that he can’t sustain an idea. His neat-o trick for showing the destinies of people Lola meets is to superimpose the words “And Then” on the screen, then flash their fates in a series of stills—winning the lottery, getting arrested, whatever. The sequences are funny at first, but they don’t have any real impact, since we don’t know anything about the people Lola meets, except that they have met Lola. Even Lola herself changes so much from scenario to scenario that her choices become truly arbitrary. After awhile, any theme about the little nudges that change our lives gets lost in noise, as though the theme itself were a mere tape loop.

Of course, if you were to accuse Tykwer of using technique for its own sake, he’d probably shake your hand and say, “Thanks!” After all, the electronica score and the rapid editing are meant to evoke the thrill of dancing, not careful study. Many techno videos seem inspired by Godfrey Reggio’s 1983 cult film Koyaanisqatsi, which used splashy cinema techniques (and a minimalist, pre-electronica Philip Glass score) in a deliberate, purposeful way—using art to make the point that we are living a “life out of balance.” Tykwer uses lives out of balance—a style out of balance, really—to make art.

But it’s not really the same. Much as the rave scene encourages listeners to live in the now—to feel the beat and throw their hands in the air—so Run Lola Run is a fleeting experience. Between Lola’s runs, Tykwer inserts quiet, cool-down scenes of Lola and Manni in bed, talking about love and fate. These gentle moments provocatively imply that the duo’s passion is entirely of the moment—that they would be saying “I love you” to anyone who happened, by chance, to end up in their life at that time. Inserted between the insistent rhythms of the rest of the film, though, the conversations don’t seem like part of a larger motif. They’re just samples.

—Noel Murray

Acting director

Actors who step behind the camera all too often lack an eye—a precise sense of how to convey ideas and emotion visually. Joan Chen isn’t one of them. Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl, Chen’s deeply affecting first feature as director, cowriter, and coproducer, is remarkable both for its lack of reliance on dialogue and for the ghostly power of its images. Which is just as well: The story Chen tells is too painful for words.

Set in the 1970s, in the waning days of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Xiu Xiu (roughly pronounced “sho-SHO”) concerns one of the millions of young urban students packed off to the provinces for “reeducation” in communist work camps. After a year in the fields, the adolescent heroine, Xiu Xiu (Lu Lu), thinks she will be rewarded with a trip back home. Instead, she is promised an assignment leading a girls’ cavalry if she spends six months learning horse-herding at a desolate Tibetan outpost.