“Everything else is pure theory”: What-if Movies

"Sliding Doors," "Run Lola Run" and other films that explore the same story more than once.

“Smoking/No Smoking” (1993)
Directed by Alain Resnais

Really, this is a pair of films, “Smoking” and “No Smoking,” adapted from a series of plays by Alan Ayckbourn (whose “Private Fears in Public Places” was also made into a film by Resnais) that included a total of 16 different endings. Resnais, never shy about cinematic boundary-pushing, offers 12 of those endings up for consideration here, six per films, and has his two leads, muse and partner Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi, playing all nine roles. If your mind boggles, consider this — like the plays, the films are meant to show how small, butterfly-flaps-its-wings choices add up to major changes, and so both start at the same point: Celia, an unhappy headmaster’s wife, goes out into the garden and, depending on which film you’re watching, either has a cigarette or doesn’t. From there, different tales of romance and romantic mishaps unfold, with the films exploring multiple pairings and fates, skipping ahead five days, five weeks and then five years to see how each of these variations on a theme play out. In France, “Smoking” and “No Smoking” ran simultaneously on different screens, so you could choose which side of the story you started with. Not that it matters, as there’s nothing to spoil — your understanding of the characters accrues through seeing them at different angles and in differing situations rather than over the course of a linear story.

“Syndromes and a Century” (2006)
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

How much do our surroundings influence behavior? And in film, how much does a setting influence character? “Syndromes and a Century” from Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul presents two possible scenarios for one group of characters. The first is set in a rural hospital surrounded by green fields and leafy palm trees; the second transplants nearly the entire cast to a sterile urban facility dwarfed by skyscrapers. Both halves begin with an interview between a former army doctor, Dr. Nohng (Jaruchai Iamaram), and one of his new colleagues, Dr. Toey (Nantarat Sawaddikul). Though the dialogue in both versions is nearly identical, the stories, such as they are, advance from that single point in different ways; the rural version focuses primarily on Dr. Toey and the story she tells an aggressive suitor, while the urban version follows Dr. Nohng as he treats several patients and shares a lunchtime bottle of booze with some older co-workers. Though the divide between the two worlds isn’t clear-cut, some distinctions can be drawn, particularly in the way the respective staffs interact with their patients (far more personally in part one, where a dentist and the monk, whose mouth he’s cleaning, share their lifelong dreams of musical stardom) and in the types of patients they see (in part two, the health problems are far more serious, ranging from carbon monoxide poisoning to multiple limb amputations). Still, unlike many of his contemporaries in the multiverse movie genre, Weerasethakul doesn’t use the form to tell a story of mad, unforeseeable chain reaction. He isn’t interested in showing how different a life could be with a simple twist of fate, but how similar it would be even in spite of a huge one. In one place or another, we all carry on.

“Too Many Ways to Be No. 1″ (1997)
Directed by Wai Ka-Fai

In a way, you could look at the combined crime-world centric output of Hong Kong filmmaker Wai Ka-Fai and his frequent collaborator Johnnie To as a kind of giant what-if universe, with many of the same players showing up again and again to explore different paths through vice and punishment. In Wai’s inventive, frenetic 1997 dark comedy, a low-level triad member (Lau Ching-Wan) either comes along on a deal involving stolen cars with gangs in mainland China or goes to Taiwan to assassinate someone. It’s not a spoiler to say that neither of these roads is a smooth one: “Too Many Ways to Be No. 1″ is really about how there are too many ways to fuck things up, especially when you’re a character in one of the least flattering portrayals of triad life to be committed to film. Everyone’s incompetent, oafish and some degree of idiotic in Wai’s absurdist tale(s), and they manage to dig themselves into ridiculous holes — in one storyline, the gang accidentally kills one of their own, then try to cover it up, only to find they forgot to remove the dead man’s beeping pager before bricking up the body. In the other, the would-be hit men get drunk and can’t remember who they’ve agreed to kill. It’s a harsh (if hilarious) world in “Too Many Ways to Be No. 1,” but that’s part of the point — even your good options aren’t all that great when you’re a gangster.

“Run Lola Run” (1998)
Directed by Tom Tykwer

Multiverse movies commonly take a God’s eye view of a character or characters, and watch how their lives would unfold along various possible paths. But in “Run Lola Run,” the title figure, played by Franka Potente, is in some ways aware — and even in control of — her multiple lives. The film begins when her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) calls her in a panic; he’s lost the 100,000 marks he was bringing to a mobster and he’s got 20 minutes to come up with the large sum or he’s dead. Before Manni can go through with his plan to rob a supermarket, Lola has to run across Berlin, scrounge up the money, and bring it to him. In her first attempt, she visits her banker father, but he refuses to give her the cash and Manni holds up the market. That goes about as well as you’d expect, and Lola, who joins in the robbery, is shot by police. As she lays dying on the concrete, she decides she isn’t ready to quit yet and tells the movie to stop. It obliges and suddenly we’re back in Lola’s apartment and she’s off and running from the beginning once again (the film restarts the whole scenario one more time before finally coming to happy conclusion). I think of a lot of these multiverse movies as rather glum: you have these universes controlled by uncaring or even cruel gods and lives made or destroyed seemingly at random. In contrast, “Run Lola Run” is generous to its heroine. When she screws things up, she’s given try after try until she gets it right. The viewer can’t help but be encouraged by this worldview, one in which we, and not some powerful force, control our own destinies.

[Additional photos: "Sliding Doors," Miramax Films, 1998; "Me Myself I," Sony Pictures Classics, 1999; "Blind Chance," Kino Video, 1987; "Melinda and Melinda," Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2004; "Syndromes and a Century," Strand Releasing, 2006; "Too Many Ways to Be No. 1," Subway Cinema, 1997; "Run Lola Run," Sony Pictures Classics, 1998]

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