Summary And Analysis Of The Film Run Lola Run
Run Lola Run is about a woman trying to save her boyfriend, Manni, from some shady mob like characters. Her boyfriend does a job and ends up with a bag full of money which he ends up accidentally leaving on a train. The mob people give him a dead line to give them the money or else they will kill him. He calls Lola in hysterics saying he’s a dead man if he can’t get their money in 20 mins and that if she’s not there by a certain time he’s going to rob the store across the street. Lola runs to her father’s office and begs him for money. He tells her she’s not his daughter and has her removed from the premises. Frantic Lola runs to the phone booth they’re supposed to meet at and sees that Manni is already robbing the store. She saves him from a security guard and they successfully rob the store. When they go to escape though the place is surrounded by police. In the chaos Lola gets shot in the chest and dies. There is a brief flashback to her and Manni lying in bed talking and then time restarts from her running down the hallway. Only this time she gets tripped by a man and falls down the stairs. She’s obviously injured because she limps for a while. This time when Lola arrives at the bank she hears that her father has a mistress and that she’s pregnant with someone else’s child. Angry Lola takes a gun and holds her father hostage and robs the bank for the money. She escapes and gets to the meeting place in time and shouts Mannis name. He turns around only to get hit by an ambulance and die. Time restarts yet again and this time Lola doges all the obstacles however her father is leaving the bank by the time she gets there so the bank is not an option. She winds up going to a casino and betting all her money on roulette. She runs the same bet again and wins again, successfully getting the 100, 000 marks. She then runs to the meeting place only Manni isn’t there. During the time she was at the casino Manni ran into the homeless man that stole the money in the first place and ends up trading him his gun for the money back. Lola see’s Manni getting out of a car with eh mobsters and they walk away hand in hand and he asks her “what’s in the bag”.
Lola is the protagonist in this film. She is constantly facing adversity and trying to accomplish her task throughout the film. I don’t find her very relatable however she could be to the right person as she’s just trying to save the man she loves despite everything working against her.
The antagonist is time itself. Every time she reruns the time line everything lines up just a little bit differently foiling her plans and making new problems for her to deal with. If they had more time to get the money she would have more options and probably would have survived the first time line. It took her three times to time everything correctly and have a happy ending.
The film uses a lot of flashbacks and rewinds and other unconventional story telling methods. It also uses vignettes to explore the backstories of the background characters that Lola bumps into. It’s a very interesting and disjointed way to tell the story which keeps the audience moving quickly through the film mimicking Lola’s frantic pace.
The clock is used as an object of intrinsic interest. We see it in the very first scene of the movie we see a pendulum swinging over the credits along with the sounds of a ticking clock. As the camera moves back we see the face of a grandfather clock with the hands running extremely fast. The camera then dives into the mouth of the clock as if were being swallowed by time as Lola is about to be.
