Lola Rennt

2 Pages 474 Words

Tom Tyker made an excellent career choice. Tyker, the director and screenplay of 1999's spectacular German film Lola Rennt, engineered a cinematic masterpiece with this aforementioned flick. From the opening scene all the way to the closing, he forced me, not to mention the rest of my classmates as well, to view the movie from the edge of the desk's seat. Then, as a result of the film's completion, he had our jaws dropped, our minds racing, and, perhaps most importantly, our overwhelming approval.
The most appealing aspect of Lola Rennt, at least in my personal opinion, was the great emphasis placed on both time itself and the timing of certain events. After Manni mistakenly leaves a bag of payment money aboard the train, only to have it be picked up by a homeless man, he calls Lola, the protagonist who serves as his girlfriend within the film, in order to ask for her assistance in the matter. Once Lola leaves her home in search for the American equivalent of $20,000 to $25,000 that her boyfriend had previously misplaced, the movie goes through three drastically different accounts of the fifteen minute span of time it takes for her to reach the grocery store. Though the general path that she follows is essentially the same each and every time, she alters her exact course just enough so that the happenings that unfold either in her wake or her presence never seem to produce the same results. For example, during one of these three instances Lola opts to run straight across a courtyard, whereas during one of the remaing two journeys she makes the choice to take a more diagonal sort of path. Alternate routes such as that allow her to save a few precious seconds here and a few precious seconds there, and, over time, these seconds add up to save the lives of her as well as Manni. Simply put, the variations in timing throughout the entire film cause, to cite just a few of the many examples, lives to either end or continue, robb...