Run Lola Run is a hungry, vital, desperate film. It's an important film, the kind which makes you want to turn off the idiot box. Get dressed. Go out into the city now. Do something. Create something from nothing. Meet someone. It was released around the same time as the mass-market project The Matrix, and shares that film's intensity. However, while The Matrix deals with the illusory nature of perception, Run Lola Run explores the nature of cause and effect in the real world. The plot, set in Germany, involves Lola (Franka Potente) and her desperate quest to save her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) within a scant twenty minute time frame. The plot is played through three times, showing how seemingly tiny changes of events in the first few moments of each sequence butterfly-effect into completely different outcomes for every character. Certain key events are examined in rapid-fire fashion from different camera angles, emphasizing the importance of the idea of decision and effect. There are moments of incandescent passion in this film, which bring home the sheer intensity of being alive- something which can be easy to forget. When at certain points Lola releases a piercing scream out of desperation, frustration or need, it comes out as an expression of raw will. This is the rarest kind of will, that purest form which is so powerful it can actually change outcomes.

Like the plot, the film's soundtrack also repeats itself, iterating elements of each track to appear in mutated forms in the tracks to follow. The beat-heavy musical style matches the manic immediacy of the film and borrows much from the industrial genre (and the British group Underworld). It falls into that category which two or three years ago would have been called "electronica." If this is where German techno is heading, I'm looking forward to the future of the German sound. The music certainly has a partying edge to it, but it evokes a much deeper and vital urge than just getting off one's face. This is the soundtrack to the creative act- that kind of sick, sweaty, trembling, desperate need to create that some of us are afflicted by in our best moments.

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