By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
A parallel universe search for meaning: Crashing in Austria
Walking through a fluff-filled Chicago the night after Crash got its Oscar tap reminded me of a 2003 movie, Austrian writer-director Barbara Albert‘s 2003 Free Radicals, or Böse Zellen. “Chaos theory” is what Albert says her film is about. In its parallel universe, how does US distributor Kino describe it?: “[An] Austrian housewife[‘s] narrow escape from the catastrophic consequences of “The Butterfly Effect” aboard an airliner only sets her up for an even more shockingly random fate. As the devastating results of a traffic accident transform [her] family and the young occupants of the other car, the personal and circumstantial fallout envelopes an entire community…. [A] dramatic fresco… exposes the lonely yearning and thwarted redemption ricocheting the human particles of Free Radicals off of each other.” Seeing it at Toronto, I wrote that Albert’s mosaic of people straining for spirituality had obvious influences: “the touchstone movie for films coming from all lands [this year], it seems, is Robert Altman’s Nashville… Free Radicals made a spirited, cruel attempt to weave together a dozen characters with the most minimal of connections.” It’s more experimental than its American kin, as J. Hoberman wrote in the VOICE after the film’s NY Film Festival showings: “Free Radicals… involves perhaps a dozen characters—mainly [the woman’s] friends and relations, and the teenage passengers of the car that collides with hers…. [Some] links are more oblique and are often created by natural sound bridges, subtle match cuts, and blatant synchronicity… Jumping from one vignette to another, the filmmaker succeeds in establishing a material mysticism from the web of secret connections and chance meetings. That a minor mishap has the same cosmic valence as some huge happenstance gives the movie a cumulative emotional intensity. Everything is connected . . . or will be.” Free Radicals is obsessed with terrible car crashes and ends in falling snow. Interesting how minds think alike: Crash was reportedly written months before this movie was on the festival circuit or submitted for a Best Foreign Film Academy Award. Then again, wasn’t there a filmmaker named Krzysztof Kieslowski who… Never mind.