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Memento

This roller-coaster of a film established Tom Tykwer as one of the most exciting writer-directors at work in European cinema. In part its success is due to the charismatic personality of Franka Potente as Lola, but even more it’s the tremendous narrative verve of the film that grabs the spectator by the throat from start to finish. Tykwer tells us that the spur for the film was an image of a woman running, and from this developed the concept of reversing the normal format of a feature film. Some twenty minutes of action would be stretched out to fill four times that extent, instead of compressing a huge amount of story material into regular feature length.
So the flame-haired Lola must run not for her own life so much as for that of Manni, her boyfriend, who has lost a hundred thousand marks of drug money he was carrying for his vengeful boss. Lola fulfils three scenarios, each as hectic as the last, trying to force her banker dad to cough up the dough, while Manni pursues the tramp who’s grabbed the loot after Manni left it in a subway car. There’s a sub-plot involving Lola’s father and his mistress, and some marginal characters who are forcefully sketched. But the emotional heart of the film is a series of conversations between Lola and Manni as they lie in bed, viewed in close-up, from above and through a red filter that renders the dialogue more intimate, even secretive. The bond between them becomes more and more powerful and, as Tykwer notes, “Lola’s strength grows out of this passionate desire.” Like Cassavetes, Tykwer writes his scenes very precisely but films them in such a way as to give them the whiff of improvisation in real time.
Although Lola seems to cheat death and to transcend physical norms in terms of endurance (only about 5% of her “running” scenes made the final cut!), she possesses an emotional third dimension denied to comic-strip heroines like Wonder Woman or Lara Croft. It’s a dimension of tenderness, in someone who could be the girl next...