Run Lola Run (5 Stars)

This is the June 2025 selection for my cinema's "Best of Cinema" feature. It's an excellent choice. In votes by German film critics either "Run Lola Run" or "Das Boot" finishes in top place, depending on which side of the bed they got out of. It's a classic. It was made in 1998, and it's still as fresh 27 years later.

Today was my first chance to see it in the cinema. I was tingling with excitement as soon as the music began, even before Lola started running. The premise is simple. Lola's boyfriend has lost 100,000 Marks ($60,000) that he owes to drug dealers, and he'll be shot if he doesn't pay it back within 20 minutes. Lola promises to get him the money, and she has to run through the middle of Berlin to get it.

Does she succeed? No. But she asks for a second chance. And a third. Who grants her the chance? Is it God? Or mysterious fates standing over a mystical cauldron? It doesn't matter. What we see is that the smallest choices can affect the lives of yourself and the people around you. It's a treatise on the butterfly effect. The film is deeply philosophical, but it's so exciting that you hardly notice is philosophy.

When I got home I sat down to check what position it has in my top 100 film list. And I had to shake my head in dismay. I'd forgotten all about it. I update my list in my blog about twice a year, so it'll be included soon. When I have time. Be patient. And I'll have to watch it again soon. It's recently been remastered in 4K, but the disc is still very expensive, so I'll wait a few months before buying it.

After 27 years Lola is still running and changing the world.

Run Lola Run (5 Stars)

This film is generally considered to be the best film ever made in Germany, based on polls held in magazines. A more cynical opinion is that most Germans don't understand it, so they say they like it because they're afraid people will think they're stupid if they don't.

Is the film difficult to understand? On the surface it isn't. I can describe it in one sentence:

"Run Lola Run shows how minor decisions can have wide-reaching consequences for oneself and others".

I could end my review there. That's the only explanation anybody needs who's puzzled by the film. However, there are other themes that run through the film.

One is the concept of parallel universes. I don't know what exactly influenced Tom Tykwer, the director, but I see strong parallels with the stories of Kang the Conqueror in "The Avengers", particularly in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Parallel universes are an integral part of Marvel's comic book mythology, but Kang was more responsible for the creation of parallel universes than anyone else because he frequently travelled back from his home in the future to battle the Avengers. We see an affinity between Lola and her parallel selves, for instance in Lola's second universe she knows how to take the safety catch off a gun, something she learnt in her first universe.

Who is the blind woman? She's someone able to see more than others. She sees the results of minor decisions and intervenes to shape the future.

There's also the influence of God. In Lola's first universe she runs between the nuns, but they ignore her. The the second universe the nuns make room for her and stare at her as she runs between them. In the third universe Lola asks God for help, so the nuns block her path and force her to run into the middle of the road. So, possibly, it's not only our own decisions that shape the future but also God's decisions, based on our requests.

Is there a balance between the parallel universes? In each universe someone lives and someone dies. Is this a coincidence or the way that Tom Tykwer sees fate balancing the universes so that they don't diverge too much?

The biggest problem is that even if we know that our smallest decisions affect the whole world we can't act accordingly. If we knew that good deeds would lead to good results we could lead good lives to make everyone happier. That's not the case, at least not in the way cause and effect are portrayed in the film. Our decisions have effects that are seemingly random from our point of view. If Lola robs a bank the cashier will hook up with a colleague for sado-masochistic games. If Lola doesn't rob the bank the cashier will have a car accident that cripples her. So what's right and what's wrong?

I'm glad I watched "Run Lola Run" today. It's reminded me that it needs a high position when I publish my list of my 50 favourite films.

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Atomised (4 Stars)

This is a German film with the original title "Elementarteilchen", which means "Atomic particles". It's based on a novel with the same name written by the French author Michel Houellebecq. Since I had problems understanding the message the film wants to give I read a summary of the book. It seems to me that the novel is a deep philosophical work that talks about modern man caught in the battle between Christianity and science, frustrated because they both claim to give answers but neither succeeds. This element is completely missing from the film. The book's main characters and their lives are portrayed in a vacuum, without the book's underlying message. What remains is a family drama interlaced with black comedy.

Bruno was born in Berlin in the 1950's. His mother went to India to join a commune shortly after his birth, after which his father committed suicide, so he was adopted by his grandmother. His mother visited him once a year but showed no emotion towards him. When he was 18 his mother told him for the first time that she had another son, Michael, aged 17, who had lived with another grandmother in Berlin all this time. The two half-brothers met and became friends, united in their disdain for their mother.

20 years later Bruno and Michael have taken different paths, but they're still close friends. Bruno is married with a young child, but he's obsessed with sex, having a series of one-night stands outside of his marriage. He's chosen a career as a senior school literature teacher because he wants to be surrounded by teenage girls. Michael is still a virgin, and he is working in a research laboratory trying to find a way to reproduce human beings without sex.

Bruno suffers a mental breakdown after a 17-year-old girl in his class rejects him. His wife leaves him, he loses his job, and he spends the next few months in and out of mental institutions. Michael stands by him in his time of crisis. Then both brothers fall in love at the same time. Michael reunites with his childhood sweetheart, Annabelle, who is still single because she has always loved Michael. Bruno meets Christiane, a woman in an esoteric holiday camp who shares his obsession with sex, although they rarely have sex with one another; they prefer to watch one another having sex with other people.

Both relationships go badly. Christiane has advanced cell decay in her spinal cord, which leads to her becoming paralysed from the waist down. Annabelle becomes pregnant from her first sex with Michael, but she had previously been warned that she should never get pregnant. The baby is aborted, but there are further complications that mean her womb has to be removed, and even after this she's so weak that she could die at any time. The two brothers are both left with disabled lovers. It can't get any worse, can it? Actually it can. I've given away most of the plot, but the two brothers and their lovers sink deeper into the abyss.

The film's humour is very morbid. We're invited to laugh at sickness, death and even taboo subjects like incest. I don't mind morbid humour. I can laugh at anything. What disturbs me is that the film is inconsistent. After comedy scenes there are long portions of serious drama. Then, eventually, the jokes are packed into the film one after another. I would have enjoyed the film more if the humour had been spread more evenly.

Nevertheless, the film has its strong points. The film features some of Germany's biggest stars, and they don't let us down, making the madness and the suffering of their characters completely credible. This isn't a masterpiece, in my opinion, but it's worth watching as an example of powerful German cinema.

Beate Uhse (4 Stars)

Beate Uhse was born as Beate Köstlin in East Prussia in 1919. She died in 2001. This film follows her life from 1945 to 1972, the years in which she built up her business from a single room to a multi-million dollar empire. Franka Potente plays the film's title role as a fighter for women's rights. As she often proclaimed, "Every woman has the right to an orgasm". This might sound strange today, but in comparison, a study in 1959 revealed that over 30% of women had never had an orgasm.

At the age of 18 Beate was a pilot. She had the distinction of being Germany's only female stunt pilot. When the second world war began she was drafted into the Luftwaffe, where she worked training pilots. After the Russians conquered Berlin she was raped by Russian soldiers, so she stole a plane and flew to Flensburg, an area occupied by the British forces. Unlike other war criminals she was soon released without "denazification", because women weren't considered to be a serious threat.

In 1947, while she was living as a refugee in a Flensburg pastor's house, she realised that the pastor's daughters had no idea about sex. She wrote a pamphlet, "Die Schrift X", in which she described how to have sex without becoming pregnant. At first she sold this pamphlet by hand in the immediate neighbourhood, but then advertised and mailed it throughout Germany. This pamphlet remained her main income for two years, after which she began to sell condoms by mail, and then other sex aids such as lubrication. This led her into problems with the law and the church. At that time it was still illegal for unmarried people to have sex, and by selling condoms to unmarried people she was encouraging them to commit crimes.

Beate fought and won thousands of court cases. During this time her business multiplied in size. After 15 years as a mail order company she opened the world's first sex shop in 1962 in Flensburg. She rode on the wave of the sexual revolution of the 1960's, even though she often said that she did not support free love. Beate recommended monogamous relationships, and she intended her sex aids to be used to make monogamy less boring. By the middle of the 1990's German culture had changed, and her business was acceptable. She received many industry awards, and after her death in 2001 a street in Flensburg was named after her.

The DVD includes an interview with Beate Uhse recorded in 1998. The real Beate contradicts some of the points of the film. In the film she is portrayed as an idealist who wanted to help women everywhere. In the interview she says clearly that her main reason for her work was economic. After the war German nationals were not allowed to fly planes, so she needed to find another career. She saw sex education as a profitable market. She said that she was praised by feminists as a champion of women's rights, but in actual fact she was just doing a hard day's work. Ironically, in the 1980's feminists turned against her and accused her of being misogynistic, due to her practice of using photos of naked women for advertising. This is a typical German problem. It's common in certain circles to call pictures of naked women "frauenfeindlich" (the German word for misogynistic is more expressive, so I don't like to translate it). This isn't just a matter of feminism, it's due to a type of "Verklemmtheit" (totally untranslatable, the closest English word is "uptightness") among some women.

As I understand Beate Uhse from her interview, she was a strong woman whose primary interest was in fighting for herself. This is clearest when she tells the story of her rape in 1945. Beate and three other women were taken prisoner by 16 Russian soldiers. Rather than panic at the prospect of being raped she kept a cool head and offered herself to the man she identified as the senior officer. She spent the next few hours alone with this man, while the other three women were raped by the remaining 15 soldiers. She minimised her own suffering at the cost of the others. Selfish but clever.

Run Lola Run (5 Stars)

This film is considered by most Germans, critics and film fans alike, to be the best German film ever made. It typifies the often repeated statement:

"American films are intended to entertain the viewer. German films are intended to educate the viewer."

I admit that this is a generalisation and there may be exceptions on both sides, but as someone with an extensive knowledge of German cinema I have to agree with the statement. German directors want to make the audience think. Sometimes they want them to think about the past, such as the Second World War or the division of Germany. Sometimes they want the audience to go home and think about metaphysical concepts.

This film falls into the latter category. At its heart this is a treatise on chaos theory. A simple occurrence can make a difference between life and death, and change the lives of all those connected. The same story is told three times. Lola (Franka Potente) gets a phone call from her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu). He has lost 100,000 Marks ($60,000) from a drug deal, and if he doesn't pay it back within 20 minutes he will be killed. He plans to rob a supermarket, but Lola thinks she can get the money for him by asking her father, a bank manager, for a loan. So she runs through the streets of Berlin to get the money and give it to Manni.

When Lola runs down the stairs of her house she meets a youth with a vicious dog on the stairs. The first time she runs past them. The second time the youth trips her. The third time she jumps over the dog. This simple action, how she gets down the stairs, has drastic consequences. In the first case Lola dies, in the second case Manni dies, in the third case Lola's father dies. There are also big changes in the lives of people that Lola meets.

A repeated symbol in the film is the circle. Clocks, the circular stairway, the rotary phone, the roulette wheel. I'm not sure what this means. The cycle of life? Death and rebirth? The film opens with Sepp Herberger's famous words, "After the game is before the game". These cryptic words refer to football, and mean that if you lose there's always another game. There is also a quote from T. S. Eliot: “At the end of our exploring we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

Click here to view the trailer.

Eichmann (4½ Stars)

This is a true story based on the interrogation of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann by Captain Avner Less in Israel in 1960. In an interview 20 years later Less said that many people had not heard of Eichmann, and so it had become his mission in life to tell everyone that Eichmann was just as evil as Hitler. I confess that although I vaguely remembered the name I couldn't have said anything about him. This film was my first real introduction to the man.

During the war Eichmann's official job was as a transportation officer. This might sound like he played a minor role in the war, but he was actually a very important person. His job was to arrange the transport of Jews from Germany, Poland and Hungary to concentration camps. Not satisfied with this, he used to travel to the camps personally to give advice on executing Jews in order to make room for the next transports. Cyclon B gas was used to kill Jews on his recommendation, since it was far more efficient than the methods that had been previously used. Far from "obeying orders", Eichmann openly disobeyed orders if he thought they were wrong. In 1945 Himmler ordered Eichmann to stop killing Jews because German defeat was imminent, but Eichmann reacted by speeding up the executions to rid the world of as many Jews as possible before it was too late.

After the war Eichmann was captured by the Americans, but he was freed after giving a false name. He emigrated to Argentina using a fake passport. For many years it was thought that this was his own doing, but it was later revealed that the Argentinian government had promised safe haven to any German Nazis who were able to reach their country. In 1960 Israeli agents captured Eichmann and smuggled him to Israel, despite complaints from Argentina and demands that he should be sent back to them. Eichmann was tried in 1961, found guilty, and executed in 1962.

The film is as much about the interrogator Avner Less as it is about Eichmann himself. Less was a man dedicated to democracy and fair legal systems. His life was under threat from Jews who considered that Eichmann didn't deserve a trial and should be executed immediately.

The Bourne Supremacy (4¾ Stars)

I haven't read the novels by Robert Ludlum, and I probably never will, so I'll confine myself to commenting on the film itself. But I guess that's what this blog is about, isn't it? The first film, "The Bourne Identity", ends with Jason Bourne having partially recovered from his amnesia and reaching an agreement with Treadstone to be left alone. The beginning of the second film ends with his Treadstone ex-bosses breaking their promise. First he is framed for a terror attack in Berlin. Then a Russian hit man is sent to India to assassinate him.

Following this is pure action all the way, while Bourne takes further steps to retrieve his memory and make amends for the dark deeds he had committed in the past. An exciting film.

On another note, I've got a lot of off-topic subjects on my mind that I'd like to share with the world. I feel tempted to create a second blog to use as my sandbox. Or should I just publish my off-topic posts here? Thoughts and comments are welcome.

I'm also happy to announce that August 2011 has been the most successful month so far for my blog, judging by the number of readers. About 30 readers a day, compared with 10 a day earlier this year. Over half my readers are from Islamic countries such as Egypt, Pakistan and Indonesia. I hope this isn't just a temporary boost for Ramadan, I want you to keep reading next month. My most popular posts are about pornographic films. I seem to have a lot of Axel Braun fans among my readers. Please don't just read my posts, introduce yourselves and leave comments. And I promise you, I plan to be purchasing some more Axel Braun films in the near future, even though they're difficult to buy in the UK. As far as I know he dosn't have an official distributor here.

Romulus, My Father (4½ Stars)

This is a fascinating true story based on the autobiography of the Australian philosopher Raimond Gata. His parents were poor Romanian immigrants. His father was a kind but impractical man, with good intentions that rarely succeeded. His mother was a cold woman, incapable of caring for her children, leaving them unfed and unwashed while she had affairs with other men. Raimond obviously loved both his parents, but makes no attempt to cover up their faults. The brilliant performance of the three main actors, Eric Bana, Franka Potente and Kodi Smit-McPhee lifts this slow-moving film to magnificent heights.