Half the fun of watching German director Tom Tykwer’s thriller RUN LOLA RUN (’98) is reveling in all of the visual details. There is so much to take in from Frank Griebe’s excellent cinematography to the brilliant use of color and objects that enhance the film’s themes. RUN LOLA RUN stars Franka Potente as Lola, a young woman who must secure 100,000 Deutschmarks and deliver the money to her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), who desperately needs the cash to pay off a violent gangster. Lola has 20 minutes to complete her mission. The film explores three different outcomes as Lola encounters a variety of obstacles along the way.

Let’s first look at the film’s brilliant use of color. Red and yellow are strategically associated with the two lead characters. Lola is presented with the color red. Her hair is dyed bright red, and each of the three-time loops begins with her hanging up a red phone. Red continually appears at various points in her story, whether it’s a bicycle thief wearing a red shirt or her carrying a red bag full of cash. The image of Potente wearing a red wig and running through the streets of Berlin has become the visual symbol of RUN LOLA RUN and usually the first thing that people will remember about the film. Yellow is Manni’s color. He calls Lola from a yellow telephone booth as he contemplates robbing the grocery store across the street, which just happens to be adorned with yellow fixtures and trim.

Red can be seen to symbolize passion but is also represents speed, especially since Lola is moving at such a frantic pace. Yellow is the complete opposite. It symbolizes the tension-filled act of waiting. This can be observed in one particular scene in which workers dressed in yellow hazmat suits carry a large piece of glass from one side of the street to another. They are confronted with a red ambulance driving at a high speed to bring a cardiac patient to the hospital. This scene is played out in each of the three scenarios with a different result. In other scenes, Lola passes a yellow subway tram, a visual reminder that time is passing and Manni is waiting for her. 

One of my favorite, and a bit more subtle, use of color in the film is when green is associated with some form of authority. When Lola visits her dad’s bank to ask for money, his office is adorned with green furniture and a large green painting that Lola rips off the wall in anger. In one scenario, policemen driving green and white vehicles and dressed in green uniforms confront Lola and Manni.

Because the film is so focused on time—not only how Lola is pressed for time but also how one small act can change one’s destiny—clocks and watches are important symbols that pop up throughout the film. There is a big ornate clock in Lola’s bedroom, the face of which is taped over with green stickers, which could be seen as a symbol of how time exerts its authority over her. Manni is constantly checking the clock that hangs above the grocery store entrance, Lola shatters the glass clock in her father’s office with her ear-piercing scream and an old lady checks her watch to give Lola the time. In the casino scene, Lola chooses to play the number 20 on the roulette wheel, which plays to the fact that she only has 20 minutes on the clock to finish the job.

Tom Tykwer drew a lot of inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller VERTIGO (’58). For the casino scene, Tykwer had production designer fill in empty space on the wall by creating a replica of the iconic Carlotta painting from Hitchcock’s film. VERTIGO also inspired the spiral motif that can be seen throughout the film. As Manni calls from the yellow phone booth, the viewer can spot a shop called Spirale in the background complete with a spiraling fixture. When Lola sets out on her mission, she runs down a spiral staircase, presented in the film through animation rather than live-action. As each of the time loops resets, we see Lola and Manni, contemplating life while resting on pillows with a spiral print.

Cinematographer Frank Griebe also employs the sensation of vertigo through many excellent camera shots. Arc shots, in which the camera circles a subject, are used throughout the film. There are lots of tight close-ups, tracking shots, low angle-shots and top-down perspectives, which beautifully demonstrate the heightened emotion and tension felt by the characters. The camera is constantly moving and so is the imagery. In addition to animation, there are black-and-white flashback scenes, stop motion sequences and when time stops for a moment, those scenes are presented with a hazy filter. The bounty of visual symbolism and the film’s frenetic pace make RUN LOLA RUN a highly enjoyable experimental thriller.

In Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s PARTY GIRL, New York City stands on a cusp, ready to burst into a new being, much like its 24-year-old protagonist Mary played by Parker Posey. The film was released in 1995, a year after then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani passed a law that is largely responsible for the astronomical rents in the city. Mary, therefore, could still afford to live in a Chinatown loft and pay rent selling off her stolen Gaultier clothes. It was a different and fast-changing New York City where white business owners had just begun to sell falafels, causing a loss of clientele for the Lebanese falafel stand right across the street. It was a New York City where the white female protagonist could still wear a bindi to go with her “Middle Eastern” outfit and not be called out.

PARTY GIRL, in many ways, is a coming of age tale—of both the city and the protagonist. It begins at a rave where we see Mary illegally charging guests a cover fee. She is wearing a red velvet blouse and a glittery mini skirt. When she gets arrested by the police, her godmother, a menopausal librarian Judy Lindendorf (Sasha von Scherler), bails her out. To earn all the money she owes to Judy, Mary starts working at the New York Public Library as a clerk and is made to face the formidable and purposefully opaque Dewey Decimal System. As her outfits get more and more subdued—less velvet, more cotton, less fishnet stockings and more plain leggings—Mary decides to conquer the Dewey Decimal System and get her life back on track. Mary’s clothes, of course, are a text that records her bildungsroman. The gaudy and shiny give way to solid colors, the unruly hair gets folded into a bun, the big hoop earrings are traded in for a brooch. On her birthday, wearing black business formals and a pair of glasses, Mary decides to go to graduate school and become a librarian. Thereby, deciding upon a career right in time before the city’s rising rents can drive Mary out of her home.

Popular culture is full of instances where studious, bespectacled female protagonists begin as bookish heroines till a desire for male attention and validation forces a transformation upon them and they metamorphosize into a sex object. PARTY GIRL is an extremely witty and feminist overturning of that portrayal. Mary, like the film’s name suggests, is a party girl. From the very beginning, she is the center of everyone’s attention and doesn’t need to do anything to become anyone’s love interest. Her transformation from the sexy, partying stereotype to someone who wants to be a librarian is essentially driven by ambition and the desire to turn her life around to afford to live in the city she calls home. Notably, it is her newfound ambition that helps her reject a former abusive boyfriend named Nigel (Liev Schreiber) and garner the affection of the cute Lebanese falafel seller, Mustafa (Omar Townsend).

Melvil Dewey, the inventor of the eponymous decimal system, wanted to employ women as librarians because he believed they could be underpaid. In Wayne A. Wiegand’s Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey, a book that was released in 1996, a year after PARTY GIRL, it is noted that Dewey had a history of sexual harassment and had forced himself upon many of his women subordinates. Mary’s decision to become a librarian, therefore, also becomes a reclaiming of Dewey’s legacy. She takes something that has been created by an extremely problematic man and reclaims it to attain financial independence and a social standing, something Dewey himself would have denied his female peers.

PARTY GIRL was the first film to premiere on the Internet. It then went on to play at Sundance, cementing Posey’s reputation as the “Queen of Indies.” Its quirk is a product of its times. “So decadent, so silly. So Mary!” a friend describes Mary in the film, and the same words could be used to describe New York City of 1995 and the film. A viewing of PARTY GIRL in 2020, however, sheds light on the many ways in which it is a limited narrative, even for a film released during its time. For a narrative extensively set in the underground party scene of downtown New York of the mid-’90s, especially within a post-voguing context, the cast remains almost homogeneously white.

One can also mourn the delegitimization of Mary’s eccentric, feminine side that (literally) gets schooled into conforming to an age-old order that demands propriety out of women. PARTY GIRL is not just a dirge sung to the passing, bohemian downtown New York City—the haunt of artists, the seat of LGBTQI activism and the vanishing bastion of carefree, slower lives that was soon to fall into the hands of real estate developers. It is also the swansong of the rave-hosting, blue satin glove wearing-Mary in leopard skin coats before she slips into something formal.