Run Lola Run Analysis

RUN LOLA RUN
How has the director used repeated narrative and flash-photo montages to communicate the film's central ideas and themes?
In the film, Run Lola Run, a repeated narrative and flash-photo montages reused by director, Tom Tykwer to create and explore the idea of how timing can be manipulative. Tykwer suggests how important timing is, as the scenes are different by only a few initial actions that change the course of everyone’s future.

Tykwer shows through three separate narratives of Lola as she attempts to obtain one hundred thousand Deutschmarks for her boyfriend in under twenty minutes. The director uses a repeated narrative to create an understanding of timing by linking different moments in the scenarios that result in various outcomes. When Lola distracts the driver in the second run, the vehicle halts too late and results in crashing into the glass. In each scenario of the separate narratives, we see the ambulance in Manni’s scenes with the second time as it runs Manni over. In the final run, Lola saves the security guard and watches Manni pay the money himself. The example is proven through repeated narrative and shows how Lola learns from her mistakes as she comes to the understanding of how important timing can be.

Furthermore, rapid flash-photo montages are used by the director to create an effect to support his idea of timing. We are shown in the film that Lola collides into numerous characters and we see through photo-montages how each encounter in the three alternate scenarios creates a significantly different future each time. All of the flash-photo montage examples relate to timing the same way, and also as she learns from the mistakes she made in the previous scenarios. These examples support Tykwer’s idea of how timing is crucial in our lives and changing even the slightest thing can create what could be a new future.

Through several examples, Tykwer effectively uses repeated narrative in the film to support the idea of timing. Through the examples shown throughout the text, we are told that life is all about timing as every moment that could be changed creates another outcome of the future.