Looop Lapeta movie review: Run Lola Run remake with a uniquely Indian element that outruns its sensory excesses

Language: Hindi German writer-director Tom Tykwer’s _Run Lola Run_ is as avant garde a piece of cinema as you can get. This 1998 time-loop thriller scooped up several awards, earned widespread critical acclaim and was Germany’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar that year.   If a work of art this experimental has been this high-profile, you have to wonder why an Indian team would want to remake it. After all, viewers inclined towards such material are likely to prefer watching it in the original language and many would have already seen it anyway, thus robbing any new version of the element of surprise that was so crucial to the response to Lola.   Looop Lapeta’s screenplay addresses that concern by giving the Hindi rendering of Lola’s story a uniquely Indian component drawn from a familiar tale of loyalty and devotion in Hindu mythology, cleverly turning it on its head, and fashioning it into one of the film’s overriding themes.   (Credits: Screenplay adaptation and dialogue – Vinay Chhawal, Ketan Pedgaonkar, Aakash Bhatia and Arnav Vepa Nanduri; additional dialogue: Puneet Chadha) Writer-director Bhatia’s protagonist Savina Borkar (played by Taapsee Pannu) is an ex-athlete whose career plans were ruined by a damaged knee. The accident that caused her life-changing injury could as well be deemed the result of a small act of carelessness or a simple, unfortunate twist of fate. Either way, the prologue-within-a-prologue-within-a-prologue through which it is recounted serves as a portent for the incident that makes up the bulk of this film. [caption id=“attachment_10338931” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] A still from Looop Lapeta | Netflix[/caption] Savina a.k.a. Savi is at a crossroads when she receives a desperate call from her boyfriend, Satyajeet a.k.a. Satya (Tahir Raj Bhasin). He has just lost a huge sum of money that he was supposed to deliver to his crooked boss at the end of an assignment for which he was allowed only 80 minutes. Satya has a tendency to be rash and choose crooked paths himself, so Savi decides to step in and save the day. Her decision sets her off on a frantic chase through the streets of urban Goa, thence she finds herself caught in what seems to be an unending cycle of events. As she runs for Satya’s life, Savi finds her own life intersecting with a parade of people, some known to her but many of them strangers who end up having an inordinate amount of influence on the final outcome of this saga. At every step of the way, the quantum and nature of that influence is determined by Savi’s or Satya’s seemingly minor actions and reactions. Its snazzy contemporary appearance and eye-poppingly bright colour palette notwithstanding, Looop Lapeta, like Run Lola Run, is pre-occupied with age-old philosophical questions about – to use a simplistic metaphor – the extent to which ripples travel when a stone is thrown into a lake, questions that are rooted as much in scientific as in spiritual thought. Bhatia even pointedly issues a reminder of chaos theory’s Butterfly Effect by sending an actual butterfly flitting through the narrative albeit, amusingly, without it having any particular impact on the finale. Don’t get too literal with your interpretations, he is perhaps telling us with this act of intentional literalness.  

Among Looop Lapeta’s multiple layers is a point  – not examined often enough in discussions on the original – about the saviour complex that many individuals seem to develop in personal relationships.

Ultimately, what the film seems to be pointing us towards is the possibility of people finding their own equilibrium and taking ownership of their lives if offered allyship rather than a messiah by those close to them.   [caption id=“attachment_10338901” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Tahir Raj Bhasin as Satya in Looop Lapeta | Netflix[/caption] This could be what Looop Lapeta is saying, or it could be something else altogether. The beauty of the source material and this remake is that it is so open-ended as to leave us scrambling with our take on its intentions.   All this works though only if you are patient with the film’s many conceits and you avoid being a wet blanket to yourself by steering clear of commonsensical questions such as: are cabs really so scarce in Goa? (Answer: actually yes, they are, though it would have helped the film to indicate that this pivotal aspect of Savi’s experience is a reflection of the Goan reality.) I enjoyed the animation sequence accompanying the opening titles, but pretty soon I found myself tiring of the film’s superfluous gimmicks – the split screens, DoP Yash Khanna’s kookie camera angles, the cutesy cartoon bubbles accompanying phone calls, and the needless back-and-forth in time even within each cycle that Savi goes through. This is the sort of film in which, instead of telling us that Savi and Satya met two years prior to the occurrences in the storyline, we are informed through words flashing on screen that they met “10,51,200 minutes” earlier. Yes, I did the calculation, that’s two years. The manic pace of the original overrode its eccentricities, but this being a Hindi film, it is about 50 minutes longer, an additional length that ends up subtracting from the frenzy essential for its effectiveness. Looop Lapeta, therefore, takes a while to settle down, and for me at least, the fun truly began towards the culmination of the first cycle.   [caption id=“attachment_10338911” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Taapsee Pannu as Savi in Looop Lapeta | Netflix[/caption] It takes an actor with Taapsee Pannu’s pizzazz and fleet-footedness to pull off this role, and she does the job with an irreverent coolth that makes her come across as both a cynical observer of the proceedings and a confused participant. Tahir Raj Bhasin, fresh from his inspired turn as Sunil Gavaskar in Kabir Khan’s _’83_ , offers her ample backing as Satya appears to evolve with each telling.       The supporting cast are strong and immersed in the entertaining madness of the premise. It is especially nice to see Shreya Dhanwanthary making a mark again in a significant role so soon after her loveliness in Netflix’s _Unpaused: Naya Safar_ . And Alistar Bennis in a small part as a hapless groom is a hoot. Looop Lapeta is a far cry from conventional Hindi cinema, and while I would personally prefer to watch rooted Indian stories and home-grown experimentation, as remakes go, this one is certainly worth a watch. In fact, it is the film’s distinctively Indian ingredient that helps it outrun the sensory excesses it unleashes on the viewer from the word go. It gets off the starting block by reminding the audience that “what goes around comes around” but ends by explaining the same universal dictum with a hilarious bow to Madhubala and to Jawaharlal Nehru’s love of roses. The scent of the soil in which it is situated is what makes Looop Lapeta as much an intelligent adaptation as it is a remake of a cult film. Rating: 3 (out of 5 stars) Looop Lapeta is streaming on Netflix Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial