Run Lola Run: Renn for Your Life‪.‬

The new film Run Lola Run, by 34-year-old German Tom Tykwer, is rather more than the kinetic thriller that at first pulse excites its audience. In fact, this film seems to establish the voice of the post-Fassbinder film generation in Germany. For Fassbinder, Schlondorff, von Trotta, inter alia, the necessity of German film was to confront their nation's repressed history. Tykwer's breakthrough film, his third feature, presents a narrative that exposes the mechanism of rewriting a story -- whether history or fiction -- and restores the primacy of the individual will and the need to discover one's individual destiny. The film's striking concept is to play out three alternative versions of a story. This is not the Rashomon-iac revelation of conflicting versions of one event. Even more radically, Tykwer's device exercises the desire to change one's life -- whether in narrative or in reality -- until it comes out right. Run Lola Run -- or in its more declarative original title, Lola Rennt -- is a contemporary individualist's Triumph of the Will. Tykwer's Lola (Franka Potente) is an emphatic antithesis to the horde of Lolas, Lulus, and Lilis that stud the classic German film. Where they are usually languidly ornamental blonde femmes fatales who destroy their adoring gulls, this Lola is a flaming redhead with a wiry, muscular build and facial features that are homey, just short of homely. With her astonishing stamina and will she saves her undeserving lover's hide. Far from being the object of her man's love/lust, she makes herself the determining force in both of their lives. Although Lola, like the classic German film goddesses, provides for scenes of breathtaking physical beauty, they are shots of her running full-flit through the city streets, not posed behind glamour gauze or preening on a nightclub stage. Lola's single costume is a militant pale blue t-shirt, pale green slacks, with black belt and army boots. If there's a boa in her closet it must be a tamed snake. There's even a hint of Eartha Kitt's Lola in the bank security guard's taunt: "It isn't your day today. You can't have everything."