Yesterday I finally got around to seeing 'Run Lola Run', which seemed to have been incorporated into recent European film history as a sharp existential crime thriller.
What I saw looked more like a dance music video, with a plot as restless, repetitive, autistic and twitchy as a mid-90's commercial techno track. Characters are too busy keeping pace with the 110 beats per minute, and the frenetically paced circular in-jokes and moralising flash-forwards to come alive. Lola herself looks fabulous in a vest and industro-red fright-hair, though resorts to shrieking her head off at several points at which some decent dialogue or character acting would move the film forward.
All this reminded me of the tone and effect of The Edukators, which pressed the button marked "Indie-Grunge Emoting Soundtrack" far too frequently to establish anything close to a living character on the screen; and likewise tried to cash far too many cheques on the account of Smouldering Youthful Libido to establish motivation and history believably. It's theoretically-interesting theme of lost idealism was completely vapourised by a relentless focus on the political thrashings and jealousies of three self-regarding twenty-somethings who have not lost enough of anything to be worth the attention the film gives them.
Even more tragic was the case of "Goodbye Lenin", which spent a heart-rendingly huge amount of effort and attention to detail in recreating the design and appearance of immediately pre- and post- Berlin Wall falling Germany, and then only remembered where the emotional centre of this would be for one brief shot (the mother accidentally leaving the apartment block and discovering the 'new' world). Before and after this, a slapstick freneticism and fast-cut 1-second attention span style predominated.
The German movies I've seen recently that really grabbed me were about older, more compromised people: Downfall, and The Lives Of Others. But that's another story.
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