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FREE
RADICALS
6/10
Bose
Zellen : Austria (Aus/Ger/Switz) 2003 : Barbara ALBERT : 120
mins
Free Radicals
is the latest entry example of the ‘urban intersections’ subgenre
so beloved by screenwriters and directors worldwide, in which fate and
chance connect disparate people living in the same locale. The film is
also something of an intersection, combining the modern-Austria-as-hell
mood of Dog Days and
Lovely Rita, with
a more general ‘capitalism is making us miserable’ message increasingly
popular in films from central and eastern Europe, as in Cristian Mungiu’s
cracking Occident
from Romania.
The Austria-sucks
concept is usually accompanied by unsparing depictions of unattractive
people enduring bouts of passionless sex, the capitalism-blues by setting
some of the action in a soulless shopping-mall, often populated by characters
dressed in demeaning, dehumanising costumes. Albert ticks both these
boxes, but adds a new twist: mild supernatural elements, conveyed using
sounds and visuals to imply her characters are being somehow ‘haunted’
by an unseen spectral presence.
The film begins,
unexpectedly, in Brazil: Austrian thirtysomething Manu (Kathrin Retartis)
is packing at the end of her holiday, dancing along to the ‘Macarena.’
In a rather literal illustration of chaos theory, we see a rain-forest
butterfly flap its wings, then soon after a violent storm develops which
downs Manu’s plane. She survives, only to be killed six years later in
a car crash – as in 21
Grams, an auto-accident is melodramatic starting-point for an
formally ambitious (pretentious?) exploration of weighty themes.
Several of
these ideas are placed awkwardly in the mouth of Manu’s brother Reini
(Martin Brambach), a schoolteacher fascinated by fractals and the like.
He’s aware that “minuscule things” can have a massive impact, and that
despite the apparent randomness of everyday life, “inside, there is order
and structure.” Albert has perhaps seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia,
a similar mosaic-of-humanity which featured a quiz-show in which one of
the specialist subjects was (implausibly enough) ‘chaos vs superstring.’
But while Anderson
wisely relegated his philosophical and scientific concerns to the background,
Albert opts for a more up-front approach – and not only in Reini’s out-loud
musings on various ‘deep’ subjects. Eye-in-the-sky camerawork and spooky
horror-music on the soundtrack indicate when Manu may or may not be making
her presence felt to the more ‘sensitive’ characters, including her angelic,
Ponette-like young daughter Yvonne (Deborah Ten Brink), and loner
schoolgirl Patricia (Desiree Ourada). These intrusions are conspicuously
jarring in a film which is otherwise carefully modulated - for the most
part Albert resists using score at all.
Instead, she
relies on the ubiquitous Euro-pop listened to by the characters – from
the opening ‘Macarena’ to A-Ha’s ‘Take On Me’, which is playing in Manu’s
car just before her crash, to the Moody Blues’ ‘Nights in White Satin’
– focus of a particularly grisly pub sing-a-long. Though often amusing,
at such moments there is the slightly uncomfortable feeling that these
people are being presented up for our cool inspection rather than our
sympathy – especially in the second half when events take increasingly
downbeat (and predictable) turns and the film becomes something of a misery-fest
‘situation tragedy.’
Most pathetic
of all is lovelorn Belinda (Gabriela Schmoll), a terminally bored
(she fills her time with puzzle-books), unsatisfied (she’s always entering
competitions, including an undignified ‘voucher-grab’ stunt), overweight
hausfrau who attempts suicide when rejected by the middle-aged
cop for whom she nurses an ill-advised amour fou. Mike
Leigh’s films often tread this tricky line between superiority and
identification, and Albert risks the kind of ‘misanthropy’ accusations
often levelled at Seidl and, to a leser extent, Hausner. Maybe it’s an
“Austrian thing,” something to do with the political and artistic climate
of the country - these directors are, as Godard might put it, the ‘children
of Haider and Haneke’ after
all.
11th
November, 2003 (seen 29th October : National Film Theatre,
London – London Film Festival)
click
here for a full list of films covered at the 2003 London Film Festival
click
here for the full list of films entered for the 2003-4 Foreign-Language
Oscar
by Neil
Young
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