Seemingly straightforward situation: the heroine's boyfriend, a gangster's bagman, has carelessly left behind a sack of loot on the subway, and his girlfriend now has twenty minutes to reach him and somehow to come up with the matching cash on the way -- or else. So she is off and running. (Franka Potente's "performance" is as much athletic as histrionic, and could be described either way as "full-throttle.") After twenty minutes, the situation arrives at a deadly resolution -- but then, with no explanation or supernatural intervention, we return to the same starting point, and Lola is off and running all over again, with slight variations in her route and a completely different but no better result. Then, one last time, back to the start, over the same route, with still another outcome. There is no sense whatsoever that one of the three alternatives is more "real" than the others, unless the first one gains priority by virtue of placement, relegating its successors to the status of might-have-beens. The conventionally "happy" ending, really more of a slap-happy ending, is saved for last, but solely for crowd-pleasing purposes. All three scenarios are facile and cavalier in their scripting, and equally devoid of credibility. The movie, far from blazing trails, is trafficking in the same basic concepts, same basic truths, as such other alternative-reality movies as Sliding Doors, Twice upon a Yesterday, and Resnais's Smoking/No Smoking. Inasmuch as the basic truths, from movie to movie, remain the same, the differences lie in areas of form and treatment -- and they are vast. German filmmaker Tom Tykwer here shuffles together sharp 35mm footage, fuzzy video, TV-ish cartoons, zoom shots, shock cuts, fast-motion, split-screen images, everything but the kitchen sink, all to a pulsing techno-pop beat, in a hectic hodgepodge that might call to mind the term "postmodern" (whether or not you know what you mean by that). It provides a definite alternative in alternative realities. And to each, as the saying goes, his own. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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