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Through a truckload of characters, as one of them points out, “Even in chaos are structure and pattern”; a young woman miraculously survives a plane crash (a truly gripping scene) only to die in a head-on car collision six years later. (The teenage driver of the car, who barely sustains any injury, is the younger son in a family whose first son was abducted at a young age.) And thus the cycle has begun, an offset registers a linking of chain reactions to the woman’s family members and extensions of people in their lives. The socially maladroit brother is attracted to a young black woman, survivor of the plane crash as well, whose (adoptive?) mother sings in a choir and secretly crushes after a deputy who moonlights with them; there’s the deranged sister (she cleanses herself after sex with milk) who’s sleeping with an amputee (one of two such characters in the film), while his misfit granddaughter goes to school with the kids involved in the head-on collision; the woman’s husband, who has an on-again/off-again affair with her best friend, and his daughter, who is inexplicably always being tested in the hospital. Albert is generous and patient with her characters, maybe too much so, but credit is given to her persistence in sticking with it to avoid merely illustrating the superficial reactions. She distinguishes the chaotic nature without being overly busy, though there is at all times something going on with someone that in some way affects another. Albert is curious for her heavy use of music and its influences (from “House of the Rising Sun” and other Sixties classics, to techno music), but that, too, is a cycle of connection for the film’s inhabitants. Free Radicals is still a flawed film, which has particular threads not as thoroughly connected or interesting as the next, and an anticlimactic close that, while it perpetuates the endless, infinity of chaos, there’s a certain incompleteness to it, a meaningfulness lacking. The cast is a solid ensemble, and Albert’s command of the image (well-shot by Martin Gschlacht) is always thoughtful, but the whole thing can be seen as seemingly tedious without an intrinsic interest in the trail of chaos. For my own intrinsic interests, it stays absorbing until the very end, flaws and all, but that’s just me. With Kathrin Resetarits, Ursula Strauss, Rupert Lehofer, Belinda Akwa-Asare, Georg Friedrich, Marion Mitterhammer, Desirée Durada, Deborah Ten Brink, Dominik Harter, and Martin Brambach.

[Worth-seeing.]

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originally posted: 02/05/04 08:39:28
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