RUN LOLA RUN (69) (second viewing: 72)

Directed by: Tom Tykwer

Starring: Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup

The Pitch: Lola has 20 minutes to find the 100,000 Marks that'll save her boyfriend ; fortunately, she gets three separate attempts - three parallel universes - in which to do it.

Theo Sez: Existential questions - who are we? where do we come from? - even a quote from the "Four Quartets", then suddenly a cheerful line about Life as a football match and a cartoon ball kicked into action (let the games begin!) : which more or less sums up this brash bit of pop-art, a film that aims to make you giddy with kinetic excitement while also hedging its bets that it might actually be about something (not suggesting that it is, exactly - but it won't mind if you think so). One might find the duplicity unforgivable but in fact it's easy to forgive, if only because the result is so relentlessly inventive, making memorable images of the most throwaway details (one of the best gags - a whistle-stop montage of increasingly far-flung places, like a five-second tour of the planet - follows the casual comment that the guy who took the money "could be anywhere") ; it's got a knack for moments so immediately arresting they invade your movie lexicon, even when their context fades away. Flame-haired Lola pounding down the street, momentarily touching the lives of strangers (whose future we see outlined in split-second snapshots), becomes a kind of shorthand for a whole brand of late-90s dynamism - a combination, as in TRAINSPOTTING and other club-culture-influenced European movies, of boundless energy and total self-absorption : Lola feels she can (literally) change the world yet is utterly a vacuum in terms of ideology or allegiance, caring only for herself and her friends. That, in the final permutation, she wins the money she needs in a casino then (apparently) gives life to a dying man may be Tykwer's way of saying that Life is basically a gamble, so the only thing that matters is helping others, looking beyond our own desires ; or, of course, it may just be a way of making you giddy with kinetic excitement.