Lola Rennt (Tom Tykwer, 1998)

Lola Rennt (or ‘Run Lola Run’) is the film I’m talking about in my German speaking presentation. I chose the topic of media to combine two subjects together and to allow me to talk about something I felt I understood!
Of course, I had to watch the film in order to talk about it, and luckily, it was quite good. Starring Franka Potente (who also starred in the Bourne films) as Lola, and Moritz Bleibtreu as Manni. During shooting, Franka Potente could not wash her hair for seven weeks because the red hair color was very sensitive to water and would have got lighter with every wash!

The film is set in Berlin and follows twenty minutes, which is shown three times with different outcomes. When Lola’s boyfriend, Manni, leaves 100,000 Deutschmarks on a train, he rings her in a panic and gives her twenty minutes to come up with the same amount of money. He threatens to rob a nearby shop if she can’t come up with the money, clearly out of fear, and Lola runs frantically around Berlin trying to find 100,000 DM. Each run contains various flash-forward sequences, showing how the lives of the people that Lola bumps into develop after the encounter. In each run, those people are affected in different ways.

It was directed (and written) by Tom Tykwer, who also directed Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer. That was easily one of the most bizarre films I’d ever seen, and this one was similarly odd. It swapped between odd cartoon sequences and Lola’s story, with many references to Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’, because Tykwer is a huge fan.

Lola Rennt was nominated for 41 awards, and won 26.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Tom Tykwer, 2006)

I don’t know what it was that attracted me to this film… and even having watched it, I don’t know what it is that made me enjoy it. It’s brilliant but bizarre. Maybe that’s why I liked it. Nothing bugs me more than feeling as though I’ve wasted two hours of my life on a predictable film, and there was nothing predictable about this at all.

The film follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a man with an extraordinary sense of smell (played by Ben Whishaw, who was my favourite for the 12th Doctor… although after watching this film, maybe not). The opening was possibly one of the most disturbing openings to a film I’ve ever seen – Jean-Baptiste’s mother gives birth incredibly quickly, cuts her own umbilical cord, and pushes him away to be disposed of with the fish guts at the end of the day, before she returns to work beheading fish. Just like that. Then, amongst shots of dead animal carcasses, maggots and rats, Jean-Baptiste is shown as ‘choosing’ to survive, and cries. He grows up an orphan, before one day delivering something to a perfume shop, where he proves to the owner that he has an amazing sense of smell, and can create perfumes with ease.

When he later discovers he has no odour of his own, he feels worthless, and decides that the only way to justify his existence is to create the perfect perfume. He sets out killing several girls, presumably with perfect body odours… He gets rather distraught, however, when he fails to preserve their scent successfully. He murders other girls and practices preserving their scents, which he eventually manages with a hired prostitute. Jean-Baptiste then embarks on a killing spree, targeting beautiful young women and capturing their scents. He leaves their corpses all over the city, creating panic, while at the same time planning his attack on a pretty red-head named Laura Richis, who he decides will be his thirteenth scent – the linchpin of his perfect perfume. He follows her to an inn and murders her, and therefore successfully creating the perfect perfume.

However, he is captured by soldiers who throw him into prison to later be executed. On his day of execution, he pours a little perfume onto a hankerchief, forcing the soldiers to let him go. The executioner, and the crowd, all smell his perfume and start proclaiming that he is innocent. He later leaves and returns to Paris, back to the fish market in which he was born. He pours the entire bottle over his head, which leads to the crowd being overcome by the scent and eventually devouring him completely… The next morning, only his clothes and the bottle remain, from which there falls a single drop of perfume, ending the film.

So really, what can I say? It’s a bit bizarre. In fact, it’s very bizarre, and I actually spent most of the film thinking ‘why am I watching this?’, yet finding myself unable to turn it off.