Run Lola Run

****

Cast: Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu

Director: Tom Tykwer

Rating: M

Reviewer: Peter Calder

As gloriously shallow as it is dazzlingly entertaining, this marvellous cinematic confection reinvigorates all the conventions of the thriller by simple tricks -multiple viewpoints, sudden genre switches and telling replays - making a movie so cool you just about need woollen clothing to watch it.

The talented Tykwer, who showed with 1997's Wintersleepers his ability to manipulate mystery, is in his element here, dragging Lola along in a breathless race against the clock which runs exactly as long as the movie.

Manni (Bleibtreu) has to come up with 100,000 marks after botching a job for a local hood and calls Lola (Potente) for help. The call is like the film's starting pistol, and the orange-haired Lola, who looks like she escaped from a Crumb cartoon and trained in an East German Olympic camp, hits the ground at the run the title calls for.

You would expect complexity of character and texture of narrative to disappear in the rich mix of cinematic languages that Tykwer employs - animation, slo-mo, montage, whip pans and, in one of the film's best running gags, a machinegun series of stills which, in a few instants, take us deep into the future lives of peripheral characters.

But each of the people Lola bumps into seems real and this is a good story - all three times we are told it. For Lola is three films, each a "what if?" variation on what went before: the last, stunning moment of the first run-through is simply the starting point of a new take in which Tykwer makes playfully subtle variations which dramatically affect the outcome.

Inventively shot, imaginatively scored, meticulously edited, Lola is a terrific entertainment which, incidentally, the bigger kids should enjoy (there's a bit of shooting but the violence is not graphic). But beware the pace: asthmatics should take their inhalers.