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132 Michael WedelLola runs in three experiments or 20-minute rounds – all in an attempt atcontinuity. In “theory” she must find 100,000 DM with which to save herboyfriend, Manni, who in his attempt to prove himself to several membersof organised crime, acts as a courier for their cash and then proceeds to loseit on Berlin’s U-Bahn. And Lola runs. She runs in three 20-minute cyclesor rounds. In each the ends are changed even though she encountersthe same bodies and forces along the way; however, in this game on theButterfly Effect, each round reaches out to several virtual futures because ofthe slightest modulation of time from run to run. The game is rebooted butthe game remembers. (Bianco 2004, p. 378)Chance encounters, and the slightest delays they ensue, lead to chain reactionswhich determine a different outcome for each round: at the end ofthe first round, Lola is shot by a policeman after she and Manni rob a supermarket;at the end of the second round, Lola shows up with the moneyon time (from robbing her father’s bank), but Manni is run over by theambulance, which had crossed Lola’s path several times earlier on; only bythe end of the third round, after both Manni and Lola raised DM 100,000each, can they walk away into a new life.Points of TransitionThe three episodes are bridged by two interludes, each featuring an intimatedialogue between Lola and Manni in bed together, shot from aboveand soaked in red monochrome. These points of transition from one cycleto the next are remarkable not only for their exceptional aesthetic status,which radically detaches them from the rest of the film’s action, but alsobecause it is difficult to define whether what these transitional scenes resultin is really a backtracking of the action, or not rather the establishment of anuncanny continuity, folded across the deaths of the two main protagonists.For David Bordwell, who has discussed Run Lola Run as one of his examplesamong a number of what-if plots to be found in recent “forking-pathfilms” (2002), the top-shot scenes with Lola and Manni meditating overtheir love serve as central “branching-points” which need to be clearlyindicated and therefore in one way or another strongly accentuated andremoved from the rest of the film. According to Bordwell, both that “RunLola Run replays the fall of Lola’s bright red phone receiver and her racingthrough her mother’s room, down the stairs, and out into the street,”and that “before each new future, Tykwer provides a slow, red-tinted