Falling Review
With Falling, Austrian director Barbara Albert tackles adult isolation in the context of a class reunion film. It is a genre usually fraught with cloying sentiment and hackneyed characters--an older, more boring teen movie where the jock, the nerd, and the princess complain about their jobs and fading looks over their previous soundtrack now rendered nostalgic. Albert cuts past the standard establishing characters exposition to dump the audience in the middle of a funeral for a beloved teacher, where five girlhood friends make impulsive, tentative attempts at reacquaintance. They leave the funeral together and begin a journey that mimics the missed stages of their early adulthood: after wandering around the school, they stop at a wedding party in a field and then get trashed at a blah club called Brooklyn.
As the women gab and deal with unexplained grudges, often talking past each other, Albert mourns the loss of the youthful group dynamics that give way to independent adulthood. The characters' isolation is heightened by the wedding party and the interspersing of a teen folk choir at the school. Flashbacks are handled with poetic grace, mnemonic devices spark a cut to a fleeting image--yearning for an old kiss or a sprint near the school grounds--then disappear. Unfortunately, Albert decides that the unexplained grievances and adult hang-ups need to be explained and the characters come to be defined by a few unconvincingly diverse traits. One is on leave from jail; one is a well-known actress; the other is pregnant out of wedlock. Their problems eventually coalesce around a single theme, an old cliché of the reunion film: mourning the loss of youthful idealism, particularly an enthusiasm for liberal activism. Albert then jumps overboard with a ham-fisted message about the characters now being trapped by corporate consumerist capitalism. These plot developments mar, but do not completely ruin the cumulative effect. The friends frequently repeat an old school mantra, "Long live freedom." Falling works best when the characters aren't sure if they know what freedom means. Michael Buening, Rovi
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