Franka Potente wears a Junghans Quartz

Twenty minutes. That is how long Lola has to find 100,000 Deutsche Marks and get them to her boyfriend Manni before he robs a supermarket. Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run (1998) runs this scenario three times, and each time a small change in the timing produces wildly different outcomes for everyone Lola passes on her sprint through Berlin. The film is obsessed with time in the most literal way it can manage: a giant clock looms over the opening, an animated countdown ticks between the runs, and that figure of twenty minutes gets repeated until it feels like a heartbeat. Almost everything you see is a clock of some kind.

Almost everything except the watch on Lola's own wrist. In a tight close-up you can read it clearly. It is a small gold-tone dress watch with a cushion-shaped case, a cream dial, black Roman numerals, and slim gold hands on a black crocodile-pattern leather strap. Printed below twelve is the word Quartz, and above six sits the name JUNGHANS with the company's eight-point star. This is the quiet joke of the thing. A movie wall-to-wall with digital countdowns and looming public clocks puts an elegant analog dress watch on its sprinting heroine, the one timepiece in the frame that is not shouting at her about how little time she has left.

Junghans is about as German as the film itself. The company was founded in 1861 in Schramberg, deep in the Black Forest, and by the early 1900s it had grown into the largest clock and watch manufacturer in the world, with roughly three thousand workers. A quartz Junghans on a young woman running through late-1990s Berlin is perfectly unremarkable, which is rather the point. Lola is not wealthy and not fashionable in any conventional sense, all dyed-red hair and tank top, and the watch is a plain functional thing made by a national everyday brand for a national everywoman. It is there to do one job, and it is the same job the whole film is about: tell her how much time she has left.