Run Lola Run (Lola Rennt).

Written and Directed by Tom Tykwer. In German with English subtitles. Prokino/ Sony Pictures Classics. 80 minutes.

I am the sex and gender editor at a magazine and a lecturer at an urban state university, where I teach composition and film studies. Over the past four years, I have developed writing prompts based on situations beginning writers might encounter in publishing. This approach allows me to draw on my own experiences working with writers at the magazine and offers first-year students a chance to see their own work in print. The movie review is the most difficult project of the semester for the students, though, because they struggle with writing concrete description as they contend with ambiguous displays of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The key for me is to teach films that challenge students' pre-existing categories without being obvious about it so we can slowly learn how the categories affect each other.

Run Lola Run (1998) was a surprising find. It is a German film that visually charms and narratively intrigues students from the start. It has an enticing soundtrack with a seductive rhythm. Its visual design is engaging and sometimes stunning. It also has plot twists that accentuate the visual and aural aspects. Because it combines all these features, it is especially suited to engaging beginning writers in developing description and analysis skills. Simply put, there is a lot to write about.

Lola (starring Franka Potente and Moritz Bleibtreu) is three techno-beat stories in one, or, rather, it is one story told three ways. The opening is the same each time: Lola has twenty minutes to find 100,000 DM to cover her boyfriend Manni's debt to a local gangster. If she fails, Manni dies. After this set up, the story is different each time, depending on Lola's first actions after hearing the news. Just a moment's hesitation in front of a barking dog or a quicker step past it, changes everything. The film, shot on 35 mm and digital video, combines every special effect available, mixes musical styles from scene to scene, slides in and out of animation, and displays both realistic and fantastic scenarios. It oscillates between the touching and the crass in remarkable ways, and we never know when the story is over, no matter who gets shot, who gets run over, or who finds the secret bundle on the train.

My favorite points about this movie are how much it cautions viewers against believing what they see--a necessary skill for analysis of ambiguity--and how much there is to describe in it. Since the film portrays a powerful woman, but not always in a positive light, and a host of ethical and class-related dilemmas, it sparks productive debates about the meanings of femininity and masculinity in a cultural context. Lola is a middle-class punk alienated from her parents and their dysfunctional lives. Her mother appears to be an alcoholic who spends her days flirting on the telephone. Her father is a bank manager who plans to leave his wife and daughter to continue an affair with a colleague. This portrayal of bourgeois values in crisis provides a context for discussing the rest of the film. Lola immediately takes action to save Manni. Her plan is to get the money from her father. However, after he says no, her path takes three different routes. Alternatively, she assists Manni in robbing a supermarket, robs the bank, and escapes the police, or wins the money playing roulette at a casino. Placing a young, middle-class woman in these situations challenges stereotypes about who commits crimes and why. Thus, it evokes a conversation about third-wave feminism, heroics, and the gender of violence. Lola is like a female action hero, but she is neither Lara from Tomb Raider nor Trinity from The Matrix because Run Lola Run highlights, rather than erases, the class of its hero.

Lola also prompts intense discussions of crime, policing, poverty, and homelessness. The police only respond to the larger crimes in the movie--the supermarket robbery and the bank robbery--and they mismanage both of them. In the first, one officer accidentally shoots Lola as she is trying to escape, prompting us to question their use of force. In the second, the officers allow her to escape because they do not think this young, middle-class woman could be the bank robber, returning viewers to question categories of gender and violence. In addition, the homeless man who discovers Manni's misplaced bag of loot asks us to consider our own fear and loathing of impoverished and homeless people. Although a secondary character, the homeless man complicates perspectives on responsibility, equity, and trust.

All the while, the film's engaging narrative structure guides students toward more complex thinking about these issues. And because the film is set in Berlin, it leads to conversations about national and historical assumptions and media representations. This is an electronica/punk Germany with bicycles, banks, and supermarkets rather than "old Europe." Most of all, though, since this foreign language film so entices my students, it also opens up new areas of pleasure for them: more than one has returned to tell me how much she has enjoyed seeing other foreign films featuring strong women, even with the subtitles.

--Brian Bergen-Aurand

Clamor Magazine and The University of

Illinois at Chicago