Free radicals

Böse Zellen is by far the best Austrian movie released in 2003! Barbara Albert definitely is a very talented young director who manages to entertain, teach and portray our society in a really touching movie (without being pathetic!). The actors are doing a good job (especially Ursula Strauss and Kathrin Resetarits). Go see it!!!

The film opens with a butterfly flapping its wings, causing a tropical thunderstorm to erupt over brasil.

Böse Zellen is a movie about many things. Chaos, coincidence and circumstance is one of its topics. Death, loss and desperation is another. Side blows are dealt out to our society of commerce and capitalism in the places selected for the shooting (shopping malls, a fast food restaurant, pedestrian areas, supermarkets).

The characters in this movie, while coming from different backgrounds, have a thing in common, they are lonely. Most are also sad and unbearably desperate. They all fight for someone or something, even though they do now know what it is they want. But somehow they find the strength to overcome this loneliness, the desperation and go on, and some of them even struggle hard enough to find happiness.

Seeing the movie in a theater here in Austria made me feel uneasy. It is this way with most austrian films I see. Seeing my fellow countrymen on the movie screen makes me ashamed for them. I think I even know the reason why, it is probably because austrian filmmakers have a tendency towards realism in portraying everyday lives. I have been so brainwashed with perfect Hollywood people and their perfect lives it startles me to see real people being portrayed in a movie. Böse Zellen is a class of its own where realism is concerned. Seldom before I have seen people depicted so authentic in the way they go about their everyday lives. Its also an incredibly sad movie, but its not going to make audiences cry because it is sad in a casual way. The characters have accepted what is happening to and around them and that way they can go on with their lives.

9 out of 10

Parallel stories about various people in recovering process from a car accident are interwoven into one picture. The director has craftsmanship to incorporate different styles of genre films, such as horror, coming-of-age, and arthouse-erotica. The influence from several European melodrama giants, namely Fassbinder and Almodovar, also permeates on the screen. The rare feeling, which only occurs when I witness the moment of a new talent's emergence, caught me while I was watching this film at New York Film Festival 2003.

The screenplay is questionable; the plane crash at the beginning is barely related to the rest of the whole film. The director's explanation in Q&A session at the Festival, that the crash indicates chaos, irony and unpredictability of life in the relation to the entire story, doesn't convince me enough. Also, a bundle of absolutely separate stories, which don't interact with each other, may look dated in the future, though it is admittedly faddish at this moment.

Several choices of music, such as Take On Me and San Francisco, are so personal that the director's feeling may not be conveyed to the audience.

Overall, this is an unpolished but young and energetic film, which shows the director's promising future.

Barbara Albert's Altman-by-way-of-Austria was the least impressive movie I saw at the festival. Following the life of a woman named Manu, the only survivor of a plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico, Free Radicals branches off into the troubled lives of her satellites, her friends who fight off loneliness with the same fervor that she does. Their circumstances are no less tragic to them; one overweight woman is so despondent in her loneliness that she throws herself in front of a train (and survives, ridiculously). Another fights with an older, crippled lover who beats her if she comes in late. Manu's daughter dances briefly and sweetly with a guitarist who plays `San Francisco' for her in a subway station. The idea here is that we are all interconnected, but the movie plays this with embarrassing sentimentality. It has its moments-I love the scene where members of a church choir sing along with `Nights in White Satin' in a darkened pub-but overall, Free Radicals feels juvenile.

An impressive and realistic view on austrian society. The film could have been a little more vivid. Some people might be shocked after seeing this film but i think Barbara Albert's intention was to keep it as realistic as possible even this way showing all cruelties of nowadays society.