The deadline in this film is as elemental as it gets: Lola has 20 minutes to come up with the money to save her boyfriend. Will she get to him on time?
You might think that 20 minutes isn't long enough to fill a feature length film, but director Tom Tykwer has more than a few tricks up his sleeve, the main one being that the events are repeated three times. In this way, we get to ponder on the differences, especially why Lola succeeds in her third attempt after failing in the first two.
One key difference lies in the editing. Most of the time, the viewer of a film sees only the final version that the director, along with the editor, creates. The casual viewer seldom stops to think about how the scene could have been shot and edited differently. But a director has infinite choices about how to shoot a scene, and the choices that are made affect the meaning of a film. One way to study these differences is by comparing the approach of two directors to the same material. For example, two of the films of the great French director Jean Renoir were remade by the great director Fritz Lang when he came to Hollywood. Renoir's La Chienne became Lang's Scarlet Street and his La Bete Humaine became Lang's The Human Beast. All four films are excellent, but Renoir is a humanist and his approach is markedly different from the more fatalistic Lang.
In Run Lola Run, the viewer has the rare opportunity to see the same director make different choices for the same scene. One difference is the angles used to show Lola running. In the first two runs, Lola is seen almost always running right to left:
But the third time she is shown primarily running from left to right:
In the scene where she encounters Mayer, she is shown first running in front of the car right to left, then running on top of the car right to left. But the third time, Tykwer chooses the angle from inside the car; thereby Lola is seen moving from left to right:
So why does this matter? Generally speaking, in Western art, movement from left to right represents progress, right to left represents obstacles. So, for example, Napoleon's army in retreat from its invasion of Russia is depicted like so:
But his victory in Italy is depicted like this:
Thus the direction in which Lola is seen running emphasizes her failure in her first two attempts and her success in the third attempt.
But why is she successful the third time? One clue is, again, in the editing. In the first two attempts, the film sticks exclusively with Lola and Manni. But in the third attempt, for the first time, we diverge from Lola and follow the bicyclist, who sells his bike to the bum. And it is this action, totally out of Lola's control, that allows Manni eventually to retrieve the lost money and save his hide. What Lola learns the third time is that she cannot control the outcome. Her fate is determined by the actions of others. And shortly thereafter, she gives up trying to exert control. She runs with her eyes closed and allows fate to take her where it will.
The idea that our destinies are shaped by forces outside of our control is foreshadowed in the opening pre-credit sequence. We see the seemingly random movement of a crowd of people from a level viewpoint:
Only when the camera cranes up to an overhead shot, the "God's eye view," can we see that the movements are not at all random. They are spelling out the very title of the film:
Thus, one interpretation of this film is that life has meaning, but its meaning cannot be fully grasped by us.