Free Radicals
written and directed by Barbara Albert

        Supposedly thanks to Magnolia, cinema has become as fascinated with the potent catalyst as it has the surprise ending. Now familiar to most moviegoers are the ideas of happenstance, serendipity, butterfly effect and Rube Goldberg. At first they could be found mentioned in movie reviews. Then they showed up as titles (surely somebody, somewhere is planning a Goldberg bio). After more than five years of forced coincidences in the fictional lives of intertwined strangers, the butterfly’s wings are beginning to tire.
        Barbara Albert’s latest, Free Radicals, tells the stories of characters unknowingly influenced by Manu (Kathrin Resetarits), a woman who amazingly survives a plane crash in the ocean only to be killed off quicker than you can say Marion Crane. As in P.T. Anderson’s film, the people of Albert’s universe have auto accidents, attempted suicides, hospital beds and forlorn children. Not that Radicals is as depressing as Magnolia, where there wasn’t as much happy sing-a-long. I’m actually more impressed by the Austrian love for A-Ha than by the simultaneous L.A. chorus of Aimee Mann. But enough of this irrelevant comparison. Magnolia isn’t even the best of the fad. That honor goes to The Princess and the Warrior by Tom Tykwer, an auteur who’s made a career out of the trend.
         The reason that Free Radicals is far from the best is that Albert pointedly establishes the cause-effect motif but never convincingly demonstrates the chain reaction. The characters just seem to live in a small community with very few degrees of separation. The title (literal translation of the German is “Bad Cells”) also implies that Manu’s existence accounts for the others’ instability, but it is hard not to believe their self-destruction would transpire regardless.
           If not for Albert’s intended purpose, the film would be an acceptable, though not absorbing, look at the lives of its characters. With a running time of two hours, Radicals feels even longer by cutting each scene to a minimum, which allows for a inclusive near-montage of information and development. By the end you see a lot of what goes on between these people but because Albert never holds on a moment, you’re always too detached to be intrigued.