Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Run Lola Run
1998 · Tom Tykwer · Run Lola Run on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Count the times Lola slams the phone down and starts running. (structure)
The film resets twice. Same phone, same door, same first stride. What changes each time is tiny: a boy with a dog on the stairs, a half-second of delay, a stumble.
Payoff: The branch points are never decisions. The film hangs whole outcomes on an instant too small to notice while it goes by. In the reading: any-instant-whatever. The reading calls this the any-instant-whatever: an ordinary undramatic moment, not a crisis, carrying everything that follows.
Look for red: her hair, the phone, the bag. (light)
Griebe shoots in a high-key, hyper-vivid palette and threads red through all three runs. Lola's dyed hair, the telephone in the opening, the money bag, the light in the bedroom scenes.
Payoff: One color carries the urgency across three separate versions of the same twenty minutes. In the reading: affective color-image. The reading calls this an affective color-image: a color that soaks up the feeling of a scene instead of describing an object.
Watch the cuts land with the beat of the score. (cutting)
Bonnefoy cuts percussively, in step with the techno Tykwer co-wrote with Klimek and Heil. Potente whispers the refrains herself. Tempo drives the editing more than spatial continuity does.
Payoff: The music is not accompaniment here, it is the motor. Your own pulse gets pulled up to the film's tempo.
Notice the camera runs beside Lola, then jumps overhead. (camera)
Griebe tracks and cranes to keep the forward motion unbroken at street level, then lifts to bird's-eye views that turn Berlin into a route. Watch too for switches between film and flat video.
Payoff: The city is a course rather than a place. The changes in texture tell you which order of reality you are in.
Watch the bursts of snapshots when Lola brushes a stranger. (cutting)
Each near-collision triggers a rapid string of still photographs laying out that person's entire future. The stills are funny, then brutal, and they change completely from one run to the next.
Payoff: Her timing rewrites other people's lives as well as her own. The film keeps score of everyone she passes.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the small things: a boy on the stairs, a half-second lost. That is where the film turns.