Take this scene- A woman running. For 20 minutes. How will you present this scene on film and keep your audience riveted on the edge of their seats for its entire length at the same time? If I were to summarize this film in a nutshell, it would be that it consists of 3 possible scenarios of a woman rushing to help her boyfriend out in an emergency. And no, it does not turn out to be something akin to watching a lone woman sprinting on a race track.
If there is one film, among the ones I have watched so far, which makes full use of cinema as a medium, then it is this. There are many films, where if you change the medium, say make it into a play instead of a film, it would make little difference to how it looks, except perhaps for the set designer and special effects team.
Run Lola Run scores high on all the technical aspects which distinguish cinema from other mediums of art- cinematography, sound design, editing and screenplay. And all of this is done without affecting the overall impact of the film, where the vision of the filmmakers reaches the audience without making them conscious of the complex nature of its composition, or intimidating them with in-your-face technical jargon that has gone in its making. And this does not mean, of course, that it lags behind in other departments which are immediately apparent to the viewer like acting. All this makes it an excellent example of a film which cannot be understood by reading its synopsis alone, making the 'how the story is told' the most important aspect of storytelling.
Run Lola Run scores high on all the technical aspects which distinguish cinema from other mediums of art- cinematography, sound design, editing and screenplay. And all of this is done without affecting the overall impact of the film, where the vision of the filmmakers reaches the audience without making them conscious of the complex nature of its composition, or intimidating them with in-your-face technical jargon that has gone in its making. And this does not mean, of course, that it lags behind in other departments which are immediately apparent to the viewer like acting. All this makes it an excellent example of a film which cannot be understood by reading its synopsis alone, making the 'how the story is told' the most important aspect of storytelling.
The most prominent theme of the movie is the passage of time, and how one reacts in a situation where one does not have much of it at their disposal. Lola's urgency and her compelling need to reach her boyfriend in time is perfectly reflected in the film's score and production design (which offers temporal cues for how the clock is ticking away). There is a visual of a falling row of dominoes early in the film to illustrate the chain the events triggered by Lola while bolting from one street to the next that are to follow soon.
The quick cuts and the photo montages of the people Lola bumps into on her way enhance the pace of the film even more. Almost every scene that is repeated thrice in the film is done with a few changes, which can be caught by a keen viewer, to show the different possibilities of how an inevitable event might play out.
The quick cuts and the photo montages of the people Lola bumps into on her way enhance the pace of the film even more. Almost every scene that is repeated thrice in the film is done with a few changes, which can be caught by a keen viewer, to show the different possibilities of how an inevitable event might play out.
While the film carries us on a roller-coaster ride with the heroine's antics, the filmmakers (in the plural because the director's vision is also shared by all those who have worked on other aspects of it) have also put a lot of thought into the significance of the events presented. The film is a maze of possible event scenarios just to show how easily things could have gone the other way or could have happened differently. It keeps a record of every second and shows how a slight change in the coordination of human action with time can have desirable or disastrous consequences, which makes us appreciate the chain of our day to day actions and the links between them more closely.
P.S: Special Thanks to Jnana Prabodhini Film Club for screening this very special film.
No comments:
Post a Comment