Occasionally, I will go away from Hollywood to cover a film too interesting to ignore.
Built around one of those beautifully simple premises, Filmmaker Tom Tykwer gets to experiment with different cinematic styles and techniques without busting his low budget. I used to describe Lola as a live-action video game, with a referee who explains the rules, credits that introduce us to the characters and a view of the city that will be Tykwer’s sandbox to play in. However, there’s a lot more depth to the different paths taken by Lola along the way, the way the other characters are changed in ways positive and negative. That’s all the cake. Let’s talk about the icing.
Brush all that plot and character stuff aside and you’ve Tykwer’s imaginative hyper-kinetic gloss, a mixture of visual styles and colorful ideas, with fenceposts in the foreground, striped flags in the background, tiled sidewalks underneath and Franka Potente going full out, with her red velvet hair blowing behind her. With her ragged wardrobe and partly concealed tattoos, Lola is a postmodern heroine without that gruff exterior. All set to what is probably the greatest techno movie score ever, the images of Lola in motion are some of the most iconic of modern cinema.
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