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Free Radicals

2003, Movie, NR, 120 mins

Free Radicals: Review

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Austrian auteur Barbara Albert uses complex mathematics, chaos theory and the music of Dutch pop sensation A-Ha to explore the connections that link a group of disparate characters. Her Brazilian vacation at an end, Manu (Kathrin Resetarits) addresses a postcard to her sweetheart, Andreas (Georg Friedrich), and boards a plane bound for home. Manu's flight is delayed on the tarmac and somewhere a butterfly flutters its wings; when the plane finally takes off, it's caught in a terrible storm and crashes somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Manu miraculously survives. Six years later, she's married to Andreas, working at the ever-expanding Shopping World mall and raising a daughter, Yvonne (Ten Brink). But in a cruel stroke of fate, Manu's incredible deliverance proves to have been only a reprieve. Driving home alone after a night out with her best friend, Andrea (Ursula Strauss), Manu is killed in a head-on collision with a car full of high-school students. Kai (Dominik Hartel), the driver, escapes with only a few bruises, but his girlfriend, Gabi (Nicole Skala), is left a quadriplegic. Manu's life may be over, but her presence is still keenly felt among those she left behind. Grief pushes her brother, Luka (Rupert M. Lehofer), a high-school math teacher who lectures Kai and his friends about the simultaneity of chaos and order, to reach out to Sandra (Bellinda Akwa-Asare), a drugstore clerk whom he meets regularly at McDonalds. One of Luka's students, Patricia (Desiree Ourada), an unpopular orphan with a sixth sense, feels Manu's presence and attempts to contact her through a homemade Ouija board. Manu's increasingly unstable sister, Gerlinde (Marion Mitterhammer), has been having sex with Patricia's guardian, an abusive amputee; the sudden loss of her sibling drives her into the arms of Reini (Martin Brambach), a vacuum-cleaner salesman at Shopping World who just happened to have importuned Manu the night she died. And Andreas, who was having an affair with Andrea behind Manu's back, now worries that Manu remains close by, watching them as they have sex. The pervasiveness of floating, high-angle shots and sudden, EVIL DEAD-style zooms strongly suggests that something is checking in on these characters from somewhere in the ether, and Albert leaves viewers with the intriguing notion that we're as much at the mercy of measurable physical forces as we are of the irrational. More unsettling still are the implications of the film's climax, which gathers Albert's characters together for a lame party celebrating Shopping World's new wing and implies that the force to which we're most subject is also the most banal: consumerism. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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