Run Lola Run (Lolo Rennt)

 

RUN LOLA RUN (Lolo Rennt)          B+                                                                         Germany  (80 mi)  1998  d:  Tom Tykwer

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.

—Little Gidding, T.S. Eliot, 1942, T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding"

A heavily stylized film that re-established Germany’s prominence in the world market, as this wildly innovative little film quickly took the world by storm.  For the Fast and Furious crowd, where the adrenaline-laced action is why some people go to the movies, like riding a roller coaster, needing that thrill of exhilaration.  While this was actually Tykwer’s second film, the overwhelming international popularity led to a quick release of the first film nobody saw, Winter Sleepers (Winterschläfer) (1997), which is shockingly even better.  Tykwer breaks ranks with the previous generation of German directors (Wenders, Schlöndorff, Herzog, Fassbinder) by embracing popular culture and using the medium to enthrall audiences, where entertainment becomes a primary focus instead of confronting the nation’s repressed historical past.  The film places itself in contemporary times, using recognizable Berlin locations, but indulges in a pop culture style, creating a media blitz of MTV music video imagery, merging various artforms, like westerns, film noir, slapstick, comic books, and hyper-editing techniques, to create a groundbreaking technique that at the time felt liberating, though much of this pushes viewers into the realm of fantasy.  Berlin at the time was confronting a new millennium and a growing clamor for globalization, yet the urban setting lends itself to fast-paced editing, much like the French New Wave, with Tykwer combining Hollywood pizzazz with the visual complexity of a European art film.  An intense race against the clock, the film plays out several times over, resetting like a video game, allowing you another chance at a different outcome, using a frenetic editing style that overpowers with its dazzling aesthetic of jump cuts, still photo montages, time-lapse effects, animated cartoon sequences, whip pans, and innovative handheld camera techniques from Frank Griebe, mixing film with video, black and white with color, all driven by a throbbing techno score written by Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek, and the director himself, with spacy lyrics sung by the composers and lead character that have a transcendent quality, as if coming from beyond, resembling the Angelo Badalamenti primal dreamscapes from David Lynch.  Front and center is Lola (Franka Potente), a flaming red-head in a tank top and lime-green baggy pants, with the slight presence of visible tattoos, receiving a frantic call from her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), having just lost 100,000 German Deutschmarks on the subway, dirty money from a smuggling operation that he needs to deliver to his homicidal crime boss in just twenty minutes, certain his boss will kill him for losing his money.  With an introductory narration by Hans Paetsch, the “uncle of German fairy tales,” a notorious voice on fairy tale recordings in Germany, each of three different sequences begins exactly the same way, but they have slight variations that reveal an inventiveness of the storytelling, all wrapped up in a playful package that is deliriously entertaining. 

While the structure of the movie resembles the playing of a game, this is a film that thrives on repetition, constant movement, and spontaneity, capturing the immediacy of the moment, which appears subject to randomness and chance, as a different decision here and there leads to substantially different outcomes.  This film revels in those slight variations, adding a morbidly weird sense of humor, where the one constant in each sequence is the camera following Lola in full flight as she races down the street, quickly rounding corners, and occasionally bumping into someone.  As an aside, the film stops in its tracks and imagines that accidental bystander’s flash-forwarded future, often comically portrayed in an unforeseen accident, much like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, where the writer/director seems to toy with these possibilities, subjecting his characters to all manner of horrible outcomes, all determined purely by chance.  This narrative insert constantly changes in each new sequence, like a new chapter with seemingly endless possibilities, a visual kaleidoscope often unhinged from reality, just one of the many quirks jam-packed into a skeletal narrative, offering a feeling of time passing in real time.  One of the keys to maintaining the frantic pace in such a precisely imagined adrenal rush of a movie is remaining short and concise, allowing nothing extra.  At 80-minutes this is an extremely compact movie, actually running at a brief 71-minutes if you discount the credit sequences, where the average shot is a mere 2.7 seconds.  In each sequence Lola’s start is down a spiral staircase in her apartment building, turning into an animated sequence of a red-headed female cartoon figure who smashes all the obstacles in her path, portraying an aggressively tough action figure, which transforms into Lola who also overcomes obstacles, many of which are surprising, even death-defying, yet she perseveres, running past the exact same city blocks, encountering the same pedestrians, including a group of nuns, or several men carefully crossing the street carrying a large panel of glass which is crushed and obliterated by an ambulance that can’t stop in time, or a crane shot from above that reveals her approach to an intersection that coincides with a passing commuter train on an elevated track, so viewers should expect the unexpected, and then still be surprised.  While not much is ever revealed about Manni, Lola is a modern age heartthrob, willing to go the extra mile for Manni, beyond even what might be anticipated, driven by her love for Manni, who she refuses to let down, where there’s a sweet scene of them together in a close-up shot from above using a red-filter, speaking earnestly to one another, each professing their love, yet Lola questions how he knows she’s the one, while she goes to great lengths expressing her own undying love.  This brief romantic interlude makes all the difference in the world, adding an element of hope and eternal optimism that never fades, which is the endearing quality of the film. 

While Lola’s unabashed freedom allows her to not just inhabit but take over the city space, defying logic and the laws of nature, where she’s perfectly capable of just about anything, and demonstrates that repeatedly, with results that might amaze even the most cynical viewer, making her a remarkably compelling action figure, while Manni, after screwing up on the subway, remains stationary, trapped and imprisoned in an obscure phone booth, completely out of options (whose real-life mother, Monica Bleibtreu, plays the blind woman waiting just outside the booth), totally dependent upon Lola to save and rescue him.  He never sees what the rest of us see, remaining blind to the unremitting effort, the unstoppable force, and the overwhelming chances she takes to save him.  There’s a curiously developing side story about the homeless man on the train (Joachim Król) who finds the bag of money, where there are dreams of paradise, yet he remains that same homeless man, still facing his own inner demons that led him to the street, an outsider that somehow doesn’t fit.  One of the central threads of each sequence is Lola running to the bank where her father (Herbert Knaup) works as the head manager, hidden inside a security protected interior, where he’s involved in his own unraveling melodrama bordering on a soap opera and has little time or interest in her, always ending up an extreme disappointment, which may have something to say about the reliability of earlier generations, viewed with skepticism and extreme disappointment by the younger generation.  The same can’t be said for earlier generations of filmmakers, as Tykwer pays homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) in several scenes, including the introductory spiral staircase that jump starts each sequence, while another takes place in a lengthy casino sequence with gaming tables and a roulette wheel, which figures prominently in one of the sequences, but on the back wall behind the wheel is a painting of the back of Kim Novak’s head, among the more infamous shots of the film.  To those who scrutinize these things, Tykwer made sure in the final sequence that Lola crosses the space that was once separated by the Berlin Wall, separating East and West, representing a transcendent crossing connecting the past to the present, setting up Lola’s chances for a positive future.  The city of Berlin remains a silent, imposing character throughout, a city under construction that must look to the future by reinventing itself.  The confident image of Lola running in stride is a remarkable symbol, resolute and unwavering, never gazing back, reflecting a mercurial figure who may come to represent a new contemporary German spirit, certainly one that Fassbinder would never have envisioned, but at this point in time one could look into the mirror and say this is who we are, ironically resorting to fairy tales to construct an elaborate labyrinthian journey spun from the web of the imagination, but this relentless effort breaks open the door to new possibilities.   

Winter Sleepers (Winterschläfer)

 

Director Tom Tykwer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WINTER SLEEPERS (Winterschläfer)         A                                                                    Germany  France  (122 mi)  1997  ‘Scope  d:  Tom Tykwer

Before the opening credit sequence rolls by, filmgoers are immediately aware that they are in the presence of a talented filmmaker, as there are swooping aerial shots that suggest an intoxicating beauty, yet they are balanced into a larger whole where the majestic realm of nature is presented as only one of the many diverse characters.  Yet somehow, it is impossible not to acknowledge that snow in this tiny Bavarian mountainous ski resort village of Berchtesgaden has rarely been depicted with such haunting beauty as here, where the shimmering backdrop of a wintry countryside has a ghostly quality, with small farmhouses nestled next to a forest silhouetted in the fog, winding mountainous roads only partially clear from ice and blowing snow, and an extraordinary landscape of snowcapped peaks that are explored with a dazzling virtuosity by cinematographer Frank Griebe in this mesmerizing film.  All but left for dead in the dusty shelves of unreleased films, this director’s first film was only released outside Germany after the astounding commercial success of his second film, Run Lola Run (Lolo Rennt) (1998), which became an international arthouse hit.  However it is without any reservation whatsoever that this initial film remains the most astounding of all of Tykwer’s works, where there’s near surgical control in his style, an extraordinary restraint in developing mood while the story unravels, always allowing the cris-crossing storylines to unfold at their own pace, taking place between Christmas and New Years, with events triggered by a car accident shrouded in mystery, never providing any real backdrop to the rather complicated interweaving narrative, which lures the audience into these people’s lives, where tone precedes knowledge.  Contending with internalized alienation issues, the main characters are each suffering with personal issues, all hiding buried secrets, seemingly without drive or ambition, living in an arrested state of development, leading shallow and meaningless lives, subject to their own narcissism and self-serving interests, viewed as outsiders in a small town community setting.  We get the feel of the film within the first few minutes, while it’s only later that we learn who the characters are and what’s happening in their lives.    

An existential snow mystery featuring two couples sharing a house together in the Alps, including two exceptional women, the luminous Rebecca (Floriane Daniel), a sensuous, overtly sexual blond who works as an assistant at a ski resort, doubling as a romance novel translator, and Laura (Marie-Lou Sellem), a more introverted dark-eyed beauty who works as an emergency room nurse at the local hospital, and their troublesome boy friends, Marco (Heino Ferch), an arrogant ski instructor at the resort who denigrates locals and is also a compulsive womanizer, something of a plague on the community, having a tempestuous affair with Rebecca, both viewed as mythical Nordic figures fitting neatly into the blond Aryan race stereotype, both driven by libidinious impulses, and René (Ulrich Matthes), a peculiar, more isolated guy that Laura discovers, who continually takes pictures in an attempt to help him recall what he immediately forgets due to his short-term memory loss.  Into this mix is an older farmer (Josef Bierbichler) whose daughter is thrown from a car in an accident and is in a coma struggling to survive.  He fears her loss may push him over the edge financially, thinking he may lose his farm.  While all are connected in an odd sort of mix, it would be wrong to make too much of that even though chance plays a prominent role, as these connections are more accidental than the controlling or determining forces in anyone’s life.  Instead the interweaving storylines give the director an opportunity to build character as we come to know them, where we eventually feel an intimate familiarity with each one of them, though it’s hard to know what really drives any of them.  In this manner, what happens to them matters, but also how it happens, which at times spins brilliantly out of control.  Again, it is the underlying mood that creates who these people are, as it comes from within.  A story of chance and fate, the film teeters between being a thriller and revolving around the alienation and loneliness of the characters, where they know less about each other than the viewer does, becoming a razor-sharp picture of a 30’s-something generation with their doubts and uncertainties still intact, each contemplating new beginnings.  The title may refer to an autobiographical younger generation of lost souls hibernating dormant from deep within the nation’s consciousness that need to be awakened from their apathy and slumber, like coming out of a lengthy European Cold War thaw. 

Based on an unpublished novel by Anne-Françoise Pyszora, Expense of Spirit, who worked with the director altering the novel’s French seaside resort setting to a snowy alpine hamlet with spectacular panoramic views, a region German audiences would immediately identify with Hitler’s summer residence known as the Eagle’s Nest, aka Kehlsteinhaus, while adding the older farmer character to the mix adds a stark generational contrast, something of a throwback to the German Heimat mountain films of Leni Riefenstahl’s THE BLUE LIGHT (1932) or Luis Trenker’s THE PRODIGAL SON (1934).  Premiering at the Locarno Film Festival, this was the first film seen featuring the spare, hauntingly mystical music of Arvo Pärt, “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten” from “Tabula Rasa,” Arvo Pärt – Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, Tõnu Kaljuste | Elbphilharmonie LIVE YouTube (8:21), fusing a dazzling visual style with a unique storytelling technique where a heavily pronounced musical score is so quiet and becomes so prevalent that it actually provides an unseen narrative structure for the developing romances and amazing mountain landscapes, making proficient use of slow motion photography, with viewers able to experience the dreamlike, near hallucinogenic feeling of a colossal mountain freefall.  There is frequent use of a 360-degree pan shot, evoking the cinematography of Fassbinder’s Michael Ballhaus, a technique first utilized in MARTHA (1974) and continuing into Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), yet there is also additional music written by Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek and the director himself that adds a delicate feel to what we are experiencing, music that is so internally expansive when matched with such gorgeous imagery, offering a poetic path to comprehension, where the contrast of a brilliantly designed color scheme against the glacial outdoors is striking.  One goes to movies for a number of reasons, not the least of which is to be entertained or moved, but the hypnotic musical choices in this film are so emotionally impactive, Spain "Untitled #1" - YouTube (6:38), and in such complete harmony with both what the characters are experiencing and also the awesome splendor of the world around them, Arvo Pärt : Fratres : Definitive version for violin, strings & Percussion - I Flammingi / Werthen YouTube (12:01).  In essence, this inner light becomes one of the things we keep searching for when we go to the movies.  It’s rare to find it in films and this director, sort of a cross between Terrence Malick and Krzysztof Kieślowski, does a masterful balancing act creating a cinematic feeling very close to a state of grace, No Plans No Projects - Wim Mertens - YouTube (5:13).