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!!!

"Free Radicals" is a stark, slow-moving meditation on the randomness of life. Matching style to theme, this Austrian film relates a half dozen or so barely connected stories, all of which deal with the part fate and luck play in determining the direction of our lives. In some cases, the characters are the victims of accidents or illness, while in others they becomes prisoners of their own needs and desires. In all the cases, however, the characters live a drab, loveless existence, filled with unfulfilled dreams and loneliness.

Although the film begins with an interesting premise, the overall effect is so off-putting and depressing that we really can't enjoy the movie on anything but the most purely intellectual level. The people here just seem so miserable and unhappy that we want to get away from them as quickly as possible and head back to our own lives, imperfect though they might be. Perhaps by including so many characters, the film dilutes its focus, making it hard for us to fully identify with any one person and make us care about his or her fate. Despite good acting, this crazy quilt approach turns the movie into more of a clinical exercise than a deeper involving human drama, and lends it an air of greater pretentiousness than it might otherwise have had.

Enter the world of "Free Radicals" if you must, but you might want to take some Prozac along with you to help get you through it.

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.

This Austrian movie has reached Sweden recently. It's the "Short Cuts" concept again, but that form seems to inspire script writers and directors to great achievements.

This is about the post consuming area. The phase when everybody seems to accept the society they are living in without protest. But typical for that area is the frustration which finds it way otherwise.

Because everybody is unhappy here. Whatever their goals are, friendship, love, a dead mother, everything is a disappointment. Nothing can be reached. And the point is that nothing is their own fault. The people are not blamed and that's hopeful and maybe a prediction of what is to follow after the consumerism era is over.

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.