The most important moment in the opening section, possibly the most important in the movie, is fleeting: while racing downstairs from her apartment, Lola passes a young neighbor with a dog, and the film shifts into animation. This encounter will be replayed three times: the second time, the dog’s owner trips Lola and she falls, but the third time, she jumps over his extended leg. As Lola runs through the city she’ll pass other strangers, and we’ll sometimes see a swiftly edited parenthetical sequence of “flash-forward” still photographs showing how that person’s life changed as result of briefly encountering Lola.
And yet this is not a film in which things exclusively happen to people. Nor is it about the effects of people actively doing things. Yes, a lot happens to people—in some cases, to people who have little or nothing to do with the main narrative of Lola trying to save her boyfriend’s life. But as you watch the whole thing with its three variations, you can feel the tectonic plates of the main story shifting and drifting. The totality of “Run Lola Run” feels like an exercise in learning or problem-solving, even though there’s no way Lola that could “learn” from a story that resets itself each time, always restarting with Manni’s phone call and seemingly negating what you previously watched, like a writer in the pre-Internet era deciding that the page of the novel that they’re typing at that moment is not working, angrily ripping it from the typewriter, crumpling it up, and tossing it into a wastebasket.
The final section of the movie brings Lola into a casino, where she appears to be able to affect the outcome of a game of chance through force of will (her piercing scream seems to shock the cosmos into realigning in her favor). It’s a startling and delightful as the moment at the end of the first “The Matrix” where Neo holds up his hand to block bullets fired at him by his enemies, looks down at the slugs falling on the hallway carpet, then looks up again and sees how the virtual world is comprised of ones and zeroes and can therefore be completely altered or reprogrammed by him—or at least transcended through the recognition that it’s all a construct or illusion.