Chaos theory becomes a spanner in the works for one Austrian town in Barbara Albert's Free Radicals. KUNAL D'SOUZA gets to the bottom of its effects.


IN HER DÉBUT FILM, Barbara Albert's offers us a philosophical essay on the human condition in contemporary capitalist society. In her treatment, our society is no different to any of the other systems that exist in the universe. People, much like free radicals in linear and non-linear systems, exist, and this has no preordained rationale. As these free radicals interact, a new order may emerge from their interactions. To illustrate her point, Albert applies Chaos theory analogies to a society in a banal Austrian town. Chaos theory deals with deterministic processes, which look random but whose dimension is finite. Set over the space of a year, the film tracks the stories of individuals in this town, where characters go about their lives, seeking to give it justification in various ways. Manu, who survived a plane crash six years earlier, is killed and another of the characters is left paralysed. The effects of this 'shock', alters the existing paths of the 'radicals', influencing the pre-existing social dynamic.

The analogy is also extended to illustrate impediments in contemporary society, characterized by consumerism and alienation, in man's pursuing self-actualization. With an insipid American-style shopping mall as its civic centre, the town in which the story is set is in this respect material to the points that the film attempts to make. Its poignancy lies in its familiarity. Readers from Hamilton would no doubt identify, and even those who on walking down Courtney Place on a Saturday evening, start to question the validity of the "it's just two degrees of separation in Wellington" theory, will find some of the characters disconcertingly close to home.

In depicting these characters seeking love or forgiveness, succumbing to mindless consumerism, attending new-age therapy classes to act out their real life issues, having random casual sex with strangers from clubs that pay euro-pop and summoning spirits amongst other things, Albert's astute observation of these lives is not unfair or condescending. Rather, she is an objective observer, drawing direct comparisons between human existentialism to theories in thermodynamics – an ambitious endeavour which has for most part been reasonably successful. There are however the occasional cringe-moments. The shots of a butterfly fluttering its wings in slow motion, just before Manu's plane crash at the beginning of the film, for instance, was perhaps a bit trite, and arguably superfluous. (Characters singing along to euro-pop on the other hand, was quite apt).

One of the most beautifully developed and moving personages in the film is Manu's kindergarten-aged daughter. While those around her are busy coping with her mother's death, she is left to her own devices to make sense of it all. The only adult counsel that is at her disposal is that of a deranged friend of her mothers. She suggests to the girl that her mother was now in the Infinity. The girl knowledgably nods and confirms that this indeed is the case, then proceeding to play. The last scene of the film is of her running in the rain with her mother, who she has taken to imagining is alongside her, and staring into a puddle of rainwater with droplets of rain falling into it. Her future is ahead of her, and she has to make her own way through it, crossing paths, finding meaning, finding solutions, all as a part of dealing with the absurdity of life, like all the others that share the world that surrounds her.