Jamie passion and passionfruit!

Another ‘northern’ film, another Austrian work dating from 1999.  Similar to Crash Test Dummies in that it takes young, disaffected and marginalised people from the Northern zone of the city who are trying to get ahead in life. Many of them are migrants or children of migrants and affected by the Bosnian war.  Others are locals who have hard family set ups.  One of the obvious messages is the difficulties human beings there have of really connecting and of saying what they feel.  Alcohol or drugs are a frequent release.  And then you have the traditional conservative Austrian values on top trying to impose their rigidity on an increasingly uncomprehanding and varied youth.  This film was designed in part to show the establishment that the reality of Ausrian youth is now multiethnic and really European and that the old rhetoric of protectionism no longer applied.  6 years further down the track and one can`t be very hopeful that these attitudes have become more flexible.  Nina Proll as the blonde cake shop assistant with the rampant taste in men and Edita Malovcic as Tamara her shy Serbian friend do excellent work in a fresh film that is nothing especially earth shattering but is an honest portrait of a selection of young people at the end of the century in Vienna.

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