The chaos theory

If there's one thing likely to irritate your average film director, it's having to reshoot their film because it tested badly with preview audiences.

Recent history is full of examples of audiences demanding changes to finished films. The original ending of Fatal Attraction, for example, had Glenn Close committing suicide and Michael Douglas being charged with her murder - but it was replaced with a crowd-pleasing bout of bloodletting.

With his latest film, the hugely enjoyable Run Lola Run, German director Tom Tykwer stays several steps ahead of the demands of test screenings by packing three wildly differing versions of the same story into a single movie.

The scenario itself is straightforward enough: the punkish Lola has 20 minutes to get hold of 100,000 Deutschmarks which her bumbling boyfriend Manni has inadvertently given away to a tramp during a routine drugs deal. If Lola doesn't get hold of the cash within this timeframe, Manni will have to face the murderous rage of gangster Ronnie. But Twyker rewinds and replays this set-up three times, on each occasion spinning off into a separate and distinct narrative parallel universe. If you don't like one, no problem - just sit it out and wait for the next version to unfurl.

This might sound a bit like the bifurcated structure of Sliding Doors, whose two alternative plots hinged on whether or not Gwyneth Paltrow caught her tube connection, but Run Lola Run is a far wilder, more inventive beast than that mushy romantic comedy.

Pumped full of adrenaline and pulsating to a pounding techno soundtrack, the sheer energy of Run Lola Run sweeps you up and leaves you gasping and invigorated.

Even a relatively simple sequence like Lola purposefully sprinting through a busy Berlin street to meet her boyfriend becomes exhilarating, breathlessly staged cinema in Twyker's expert hands.

No doubt he'll now be flooded with calls from Hollywood to do the latest computer-generated image-laden action movie.

Stylistically, the film feels like it's about to burst at the seams. Flitting from film to video to animation and then back again, Run Lola Run has something of the jittery restlessness, the attention- grabbing aesthetics of MTV and its myriad copycat channels.

But it's to the MTV generation's Playstation and Nintendo- addicted little brothers that the film is most likely to appeal. With her baggy combats, red-dreadlocks and compulsion to run everywhere, Lola, played by Franka Potente, is nothing if not a German-version of the world's first virtual superstar, Tomb Raider's Lara Croft.

And with his three different versions of the same story, it's as if Twyker has applied some video-game logic to writing his script. He's like the frustrated Playstation gamer who simply starts playing all over again when faced with those dreaded words: Game Over.

But for all its formal exuberance, some of the finest moments in Run Lola Run occur in the film's quieter scenes. The movie is full of sly, knowing ironies: there's a point in each of the three stories where we're let into the fate of a young mother whom Lola bumps into.

In one version of Lola's tale, she ends up committing suicide; in another, she wins the lottery and gets rich. Fate, Twyker seems to be telling us, can be cruel or kind in equal measure.

But then fate has got nothing to do with it. Showing us how the smallest of incidents can have the most dramatic of effects, Run Lola Run is all about chance. It's film-making meets chaos theory. And rarely has chaos looked so attractively packaged and so deliriously entertaining as it does here.

Edward Lawrenson

Copyright 1999
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