An admirable attempt that winds up about as charming and magical as calculating a checksum. Still to create a "love story" wherein the main characters never speak to each other was an interesting feat. Ultimately I got the sense that the director didn't want us to attach to any one character too much for fear that we would lose track of the plight and the path of the cosmic pinball connecting them all.
Other films have traced the vagaries of existence, I'll never forget "Slacker" and its camera-as-transmittable-disease approach. That film, and others had characters that drew you in with more than a powerful pout and a pop star. Also the idiots in that film were more reckless than wretched. Here we have some despicable folks...
One of them is, pardon my (lack of) french, a dick. Indeed that is how he is introduced to us, full frontal and head on. We've also got a heartless mother, a selfish roommate, a compassionless store clerk, a petty thief and a liar. Well at least the liar does have a bit of reckoning, and provides some humor along the way.
At various points in the film, popular methods of charting the fates are engaged. A horoscope, tarot cards, a palm reading, a strange scrambling of the letters of a name, I don't think there were any tea leaves to be read. These methods are generally dismissed, but the intricate criss-crossing of the crasser crowd does help to guide our stars towards a more star-crossed pairing.
Will they meet or miss by the width of a butterfly's wing??
More importantly, will the audience care? At the end of the film, I found myself more intrigued by a bald character who we meet during another game of chance in a park (when "le penis" stakes his actions to the toss of a pebble). His bald comments and clear voicing of intention make him stand out like a lucid dream.
What the hell is he doing? Is his act of volition meant to taunt us, the invisible voyeurs in every scene? Or is he god...not playing dice with the universe, but loading the pebble? I'm afraid I'm making this film seem more interesting than it was...the battle of will versus fate versus karma versus various crystal balls, like the depth of the characters never quite gets to the foreground.
But perhaps by my not enjoying this film so much, I will not tip as much the next time I go out to eat, so your roommate will come home in a crabby mood, so you'll not go out to the Bottom of the Hill together, instead you'll rent a movie from the bald incarnation of Zeus at your local video store who *intentionally* will slip this DVD into the "Slacker" box you thought you were going to rent.
And you'll love it...
But in case that doesn't happen...
5/10
