The storyline follows a loop and uses spirals as a visual motif. Director Tom Tykwer says that he began his work on Lola rennt with the image of a woman running in his mind. “I always start with the image. I get an image in my head and I start wanting to get it moving, to build a story around it and then make a film out of it. In Run Lola Run it was a woman running,” says Tykwer. Lola runs and time warps or loops to help her achieve her goals, while exploring the various possibilities of how things might have turned out.

Lola (Franka Potente) is a beautiful red-haired punk girl in love with Manni (Moritz Bleibteu), a go-for boy for a tough gangster. The film begins with an accident of fate. Lola’s scooter gets stolen, when she’s on her way to pick up Manni. Manni, carrying 100,000 DM for his boss, then has to catch a bus and loses the money. He calls Lola in a frantic state. He needs 100,000 DM for his boss, in 20 minutes or his life is at stake. Lola runs.

Next, we are presented with three realities or the ways in which three parallel universes are formed, with the slightest incident significantly impacting the outcome of the story. In the first reality, Lola runs to her father for money. He tells her “no” and that he’s not her real father. Lola ends up running to Manni, who has a robbery in progress. They flee the scene together and Lola is shot by an edgy police officer. The second reality begins to play out when Lola is dying. This time, she’s tripped by a small boy on the way out of her apartment, which leaves enough time for her father to learn that his mistress has been unfaithful. Lola interrupts their argument and, angry at what she has learned, robs her father at gunpoint. Through a series of events, altered by Lola’s delay, Manni ends up getting hit by an ambulance at the end of the second reality.

 

In the third and final reality, Lola moves a tiny bit faster. She bumps into a car long enough to prevent an accident that happens in the other realities. However, when Lola gets to the bank, her father has already left. She ends up at a casino and wins enough money to help Manni, but has to get to him in time. She catches a ride in the ambulance, where she is able to help stabilize the condition of a man from her father’s bank, who has suffered a heart attack. Manni, meanwhile, is able to retrieve his money from the bum he ran into on the bus. He gets himself out of trouble and winds up 100,000 DM richer with Lola.

Coincidences appear to drive the plot of Lola rennt, raising questions about the unpredictability of life and the ways in which the smallest act impacts our lives and the lives of the people around us. For his use of the themes of time and parallel lives, Twyker owes an obvious debt to the polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski and his films, like Blind Chance (1987) and The Double Life of Véronique (1991). Twyker and Kieślowski actually had a strong friendship and working relationship, Twyker even finished the film that Kieślowski was working on when he died in 1996. Twyker himself has expressed an interest in Time and recognizes it as a recurrent theme in his films, especially the way it can be manipulated.

If Lola rennt has a Hollywood “feel,” it also owes a lot to American cultural influences. Twyker was influenced by Western movies and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). The 20 minute deadline borrows from the “before sundown” racing action feel of the old American Western movies and many of the visuals borrowed from Hitchcock’s film. The painting on the back wall of the casino, by production designer Alexander Manasse is of Kim Novak as she appeared in Vertigo. The robbery scene is also referred to as a tribute to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994).