Running in place in three variations
In the Moscow "cinema of the 21st century" "Strela" you can watch the German film "Run, Lola, Run", which some have already proclaimed as the first sign of 21st century cinema - it so cleverly combines cinema, video, animation and computer games.

The original title of the film by 35-year-old director Tom Tykwer is “Lola rennt” (“Lola rushes”). Throughout the film, the heroine rushes around the city in order to get a thousand marks for her boyfriend, a drug courier who accidentally left his bag with money on the subway. You need to get the money in 20 minutes, otherwise the guy will be killed. The film fits three attempts, three times 20 minutes each - each time time is rewinded back, and Lola starts her run all over again, because the result of the first two attempts cannot satisfy either the director, the audience, and especially the heroes who must remain in the finale safe and sound and with a lot of money.
The film is preceded by an epigraph: “The game lasts 90 minutes. This is a fact. Everything else is theory.” Probability theory. Every second, without even knowing it, you make a decision that can change your life. Every second the virtual “lot” falls heads or tails. If Lola had not stopped to buy cigarettes, her moped would not have been stolen, she would have met her friend, and he would not have lost the money. There's a well-known concept involved in rewinding time: if you go back in time a couple of weeks and change something stupid - like putting on a different sweater - then when you return to the present, you might find it changed beyond recognition. Such a mental game never, either in movies or in life, gets boring for a person with imagination and a good memory for the most trivial details.
Tikver, like Tarantino (to whose films “Lola” has been compared), is looking for ways to manipulate time, but does it in his own way: “Usually in a film, a whole week or a whole life fits into 90 minutes. And I thought it would be interesting ", on the contrary, stretch 20 minutes into an hour and a half and see how it works out. You stretch the time and suddenly you begin to see gaps in its fabric. In these gaps you can put individual small stories." Super-laconic life stories of the people Lola meets along the way are depicted in the film with rapid cuts of freeze frames - this is the director’s most witty idea. “I don’t think it’s possible to retell an entire life faster than we did in Lola. It’s even faster than in any Hong Kong film,” Tikver quite rightly believes.
It’s not that the characters’ characters and their relationships are not important, but there is simply no time to thoroughly educate the viewer about them. Either he will manage to establish some kind of emotional connection with the characters during their short telephone conversation at the very beginning - or the film will remain a rather mechanical computer game for him. Therefore, the conversation, which lasts a few seconds, was filmed over two days - we rehearsed and filmed Lola all day, then spent the whole day trying to get her friend Manny to panic.
But even if you are a hopeless phlegmatic and have not had time to feel sympathy for heroes similar to comic book characters, in the end, it’s just nice to sit quietly for an hour and a half and watch how someone runs around because of brainless idiots who cannot be relied on for anything. then someone else, not you.

LIDIA J-MASLOVA
At the Strela cinema, from January 28 at the Cinema Center.

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 6 dated January 20, 2000, page 13

Authors:

Lidiya Maslova