Run Lola Run is a 1998 German movie telling a story of a young woman who needs to get a significant sum of money before her boyfriend robs a supermarket. To change the course of events and save Manny’s life, Lola has to run to the beat. The movie is set in a 1998 Berlin, where streets and sights pass, as Lola runs, telling the viewers another story.
First of all, this is a narrative of a city only ten years after the fall of the concrete wall that once made Berlin divided into two geopolitical entities. As defined by Edelman, “the fast-paced movie is an engaging mix of live drama and animation offering a number of possible endings and explores routes through the city” (142). More importantly, as Edelman elaborates further: “city, which still shows the effects of its long division and isolation during the Cold War” (142). This new national-cultural site becomes a setting for Tom Tykwer’s movie Run Lola Run.
Secondly, the streets of the city are unusually depopulated and realistic, even though Run Lola Run is considered a cyberpunk film. This discordance might imply that the rest of the city is likely to be at work endeavoring to earn and save money legally while the main characters have gone astray. As rightly mentioned by Heinsohn, “the city has always been more than a mere setting, or extension, for fictional characters” (382). Berlin’s deserted streets perform as characters in itself, highlighting the contrast between Lola’s endurance and the reality of the day.
In this respect, modern-day Berlin is represented in the movie Run Lola Run in different guises and serves several purposes. The city is not only a setting for the characters’ drama but also an artistic device intended to provide guidance into the character’s inner world. Besides, Berlin, as it is shown in the movie, portrays a picture of a scarred post-Cold War city, which creates an extraordinary polyphonic effect of two narrations in the same film, where Berlin stands as yet another protagonist.
Works Cited
Edelman, David J. “The City in Cinema: A Global Perspective.” Current Urban Studies, vol. 4, no. 02, 2016, pp. 140-145.
Heinsohn, Bastian. “Berlin: Images of A Transformed City.” Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, 2016, pp. 381-387.