The easiest part of the film’s narrative to discuss is the duration. While it may seem complicated, it’s actually quite simple. The actual duration of the film itself, or run time, is 81 minutes ("Run Lola Run"). The duration of the plot is about 22-27 minutes give or take depending really on which run through of the events you look at. The duration of the story is unknown it seems. It starts with Manny and Lola in bed, talking, and ends with whichever of the “flash-forward” ("Run Lola Run") snapshots ends last chronologically within the third sequence Which of the two flashbacks when the pair talk happened first is unknown and when they happened is unknown, but they did happen before Manny got the drugs the day the plot takes place.
The easy stuff about the narrative stops there. While the film is not a really difficult film to follow it is very odd and it opens that way. People in a fog and philosophy aside, the cartoon, the red hair, the glass-shattering scream, and the editing of the “what”s and the phone dropping hint at this film certainly not being normal. Then there are the “flash-forwards” of the people Lola runs into that sort of take the audience out of the moment before throwing them back in. There’s also the shifts to other, seemingly unimportant characters like the dad and the mistress. But the audience knows that something is really up when Lola dies in the first sequence. It’s maybe thirty minutes into the film and our protagonist is dead. Then, a few seconds later we go back in time twenty minutes or so to when she runs out of the house leaving the audience going, “wait--what?! I thought we already saw this!” And then everything changes. We expect that the film will be unconventional from the get go, but it’s when Lola dies in the first sequence that all the expectations sort of get thrown out the window. They are rebuilt during the second sequence so that by the time we get to the third one the director is able to gloss over a lot of stuff because we know what to expect for the most part. Unlike most films where the expectations are created in the first act or so, this film creates them mid-film.
Admittedly, this odd repetitions of the same narrative still manage to grow and arc the characters as we learn more about them. Lola, the protagonist, is impulsive, her scream breaks glass, she loves her boyfriend, she has an interesting relationship with her father that develops over the course of the film, she’s very lucky, she cares about people, she’s very determined, and doing illegal things don’t seem to bother her much. The antagonists change except for one. The main antagonist would be the drug dealer Manny works for. He creates all of the tension in the film. The only other antagonist would really be the father, but that’s just in the first one. One could argue, in a technical way, the cop and the ambulance driver who kill Lola and Manny in the first and second sequences, but the drug dealer, who is a ruthless businessman, and the father, a cheating banker who at one point totally disowns his daughter, are really the two main antagonists.
As far as the arcs go, Lola’s is the easiest to sort of define. Honestly, not much is known about the drug dealer except that he’s ruthless, but doesn’t seem to care as long as he gets his money (as seen at the end of the film when Manny gives him the cash). The father’s is even more tricky. Based on what happens in the film, we can assume that Lola remembers what happened in the other situations (she doesn’t try the same things twice, she remembers how to use a gun in the second one even though she didn’t know how to until Manny taught her in the first ("Run Lola Run"), she avoids the dog and the guy in the cartoon by the second time, she goes through the security guard faster after the first time, and she hops a ride on the ambulance the third time after seeing it kill Manny the second time; she’s also the character we follow and says “Stop” at the end of the first sequence which starts the second sequence), but we cannot assume that the father does. Sure, what he does changes, but that can be attributed to the “Butterfly Effect” ("Run Lola Run") much like the changes in everyone else’s lives can. So the father sort of arcs, but it’s less traditional character development and more our perception of him based on the changes in the different sequences. In the first one, we see him as a jerk who disowns his not-daughter while having an affair. But in the second one, he’s less of a jerk, not disowning Lola, but just trying to get rid of her so that he can deal with his mistress who he’s angry at this time. In the third one, he’s not angry and his mistress and he doesn’t even run into Lola; actually, he gets into a car accident. He doesn’t change as a character, going from a jerk to a nice guy, but our perception of him changes as we go from seeing him as a massive jerk to almost feeling bad for the guy. It’s not a traditional arc.
Lola certainly evolves though. Since she consciously moves through the three sequences it’s not as non-traditional as he father’s. As stated previously, she does learn as she goes through the sequences. Like all good character arcs, she makes mistakes and learns from them. She even reaches a low point when her plans fail in the third sequence when she can’t ask her dad for the money and has to improvise. That’s when she goes to the casino, takes a risk, and gets the money. She even changes her mind about Manny when she dies the first, realizing that she really does want to be with him. It’s a very weird arc, but it certainly is an arc.
One other really odd part of the narrative is the use of the “flash-forwards.” They really do play into the “Butterfly Effect” part of the film. Each time Lola encounters someone--the woman with the baby, the woman in the hallway in the bank, the teller--the audience is shown their future in a series of snapshots. Other people’s--like the security guard, the guy in the car, her dad, the mistress--future changes each time she encounters them and we see theirs normally. But the snapshots are very interesting though. They take the audience out of the narrative proper and show how the littlest things in someone’s life can change it. The woman with the baby for example: in the first sequence we see snapshots of her losing her baby and then stealing another; in the second one we see her win the lottery; and in the third one we see her have a religious experience. Each one is totally different and all of the other snapshot series are that different. It totally pulls the audience out of Lola’s small world and into a larger one, forcing the audience to keep in mind the rest of the world rather than just the one story we see playing out before us.
In all, Run Lola Run is an effective, unique, and very interesting take on the narrative form.
Works Cited
"Run Lola Run." Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 26 Sept. 2012.
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