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Falling (2006)
Director: Barbara Albert
Movie review
From Time Out New York
Part feel-bad cinema and part female-bonding session, Barbara Albert’s Big Chill–ish melodrama gathers together five former schoolmates who meet up again at a professor’s funeral. All the usual screwy-chick stereotypes are present and accounted for: We’ve got the witty, bitter single-mom-to-be (Proll); the party girl (Strauss) who’s dealing with loads of buried pain; the upwardly mobile bourgeois actress (Resetarits); the crunchy-granola kook (Gabriela Hegedüs); and the mousy wallflower (Birgit Minichmayr) who’s held fast to the political ideology of the group’s youth. Over the next 24 hours, skeletons peek out of their closets and ancient grudges are dug up. Thankfully, there’s no problem that can’t be handled by an inordinate number of sing-alongs or some impromptu dancing to reggae and Euro-disco. Who needs psychological insight when you can just stage a group hug?It’s a bummer, since Albert’s Free Radicals (2003) showed a knack for taking the car-wreck sociology still in vogue among Vienna’s filmmakers and using it for something besides blunt shocks. Though she coaxes good performances from her cast (especially Proll), Falling’s touchy-feely vibe feels like an artistic devolution; if the kinder, gentler route translates only as cloying and diluted, maybe wallowing in misanthropy isn’t such a negative option.
Author: David Fear
Time Out New York
Cast & crew
Director: Barbara Albert
Cast: Nina Proll, Birgit Minichmayr, Ursula Strauss, Kathrin Resetarits, Gabriella Hegedûs, Ina Strnad full cast
Genre(s): Drama
Duration: 88 mins
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