If you’ve never seen this, here’s your chance to see it how it was meant to be seen.
YOU MUST!!
Starring: Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup, Nina Petri, Joachim Król, Armin Rohde, Heino Ferch, Suzanne von Borsody,
Sebastian Schipper
Genres: Action, Crime, Thriller
Rated: R
Distributed by: Prokino Filmverleih, Sony Pictures Classics
PLOT
Manni, a bagman responsible for delivering 100,000 Deutschmarks, frantically calls his girlfriend Lola. Manni says that he was riding the U-Bahn to drop off the money and fled upon seeing ticket inspectors, before realizing that he had left the money bag behind; he saw a homeless man examining it as the train pulled away. Manni’s boss Ronnie will kill him in 20 minutes unless he has the money, so he is preparing to rob a nearby Bolle [de] supermarket to replace the funds. Lola implores Manni to wait for her and decides to ask her father, a bank manager, for help.
Lola hangs up and runs down the staircase of her apartment building past a man with a dog. At the bank, her father is having a conversation with his mistress, who discloses her pregnancy. When Lola arrives, her conversation with her father turns into an argument. He tells her that he is leaving her mother and that Lola is not his biological daughter. Lola runs to meet Manni but arrives too late and sees him entering the supermarket with a gun. She helps him rob 100,000 marks but on leaving, they find it surrounded by police. Surrendering, Manni throws the money bag into the air, which startles a police officer who accidentally shoots Lola dead.
Events restart from the moment Lola leaves the house. This time, the man with the dog trips her with his leg, and now she runs with a limp and arrives late to the bank, allowing her father’s mistress to add that he is not the father of her unborn child. A furious Lola overhears the conversation, grabs a security guard’s gun, holds her father hostage and robs the bank of 100,000 marks. When police mistake her for a bystander, she is able to leave and meet with Manni in time but a speeding ambulance that Lola had distracted moments earlier fatally runs him over.
Events begin again. Lola leaps over the man and his dog, arriving at the bank earlier but not triggering an auto accident as she did the first two times. Consequently, her father’s colleague arrives before her and takes him away from the office. Lola now wanders aimlessly before entering a casino, where she hands over all her cash and plays roulette with a 100-mark chip. She bets it on the number 20, which wins. Roulette pays 35 to 1, so she wins 3,500 more marks, which she immediately adds to her original chip on 20. She now shrilly screams, and 20 comes up again. She leaves with a bag containing 129,600 marks and runs to Manni’s rendezvous. Manni spots the homeless man from the subway passing by on a bicycle with the money bag. Manni steals back the bag at gunpoint, exchanging his gun. A dishevelled and perspiring Lola arrives to witness Manni handing off the money to Ronnie. As the pair walk along, Manni casually asks Lola about her bag.
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