Happenstance

Do you know about the Butterfly Effect? Sure you do. Jeff Goldblum explained it in Jurassic Park: "A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine." As one might guess from the title itself, Happenstance is all about randomness and chance. It details how the tiniest of events can lead to a particular outcome--in this case, the uniting of two soulmates.

Happenstance adheres strictly to its philosophy, perhaps to a fault. The film skips from person to person in what is quite a large ensemble cast, itemizing how each of them contributes to the system. Due to the intricacies of details involved, in order to bring the audience to the "main" characters' resolution, it fails to follow up on supporting players, many of whom shared as much screen time as the leads. As a result, audiences might be left with more questions than what answers the ending provides. This might be solved by extending the length of the film to follow the other characters, but Happenstance borders on sluggishness at 90 minutes.

Still, because of the film's constant reverence to its notions of chance and fate, it leaves us with a sense of faith that "happenstance" will come to everyone in their own turn.

With such a large cast, it's surprising that there seem to be no weak links among them.

We get to see a different side of Audrey Tautou's spectrum than the naive, wide-eyed dreamer we're familiar with... Here, she's a bit cynical, certainly a realist, and at times, rather self-centered. Her eyes and head hang a little low, and the pixie we watched in Amélie practically disappears. As with He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, this film is not a great challenge to her acting abilities, but she provides a simple role with solid performance.

The same can be said with all the cast, though it's a bit challenging to match actors' names with the characters' faces. They each play his or her role evenly, with a unique and distinguishable set of strengths and weaknesses.

Such characterization was obviously well thought out by Laurent Firode, who wrote and directed Happenstance. He does a magnificent job at characterization, and one wonders how great he might do with a film focused on two or three main characters. His visual style, while not overpowering, also contributes greatly to the presentation of detail in the film.

Don't rent this expecting Audrey Tautou in every scene, but if you wish to sample some more of her acting, or if you're just interested in an intelligent foreign film, Happenstance should leave you happy.

This film is cute and spirited but not particularly deep. I was drawn into the film just to see how far this director would take this outworn theory that every event in life effects things immediately around us. There is a Law of Cause and Effect that determines what happens to an individual, but the theories of luck, fate, predestination and coincidence are not true. Therefore, I had some trouble accepting the butterfly theory. The butterfly or a man does something and something happens as a result of that action. It does not happen in the nice convenient way that this film seems to wish us to believe. In other words, our actions determine our life but do not, necessarily, influence those around us, though they may.

Audrey Tautou is as charming and delightful as she was in Amelie. The supporting cast is delightful. The film is delightful and I recommend it. Just do not get so caught up in the "message" of the film for it is fairly meaningless.

The mystery here is why this delightful, small comedy has been ignored by most critics and has failed to find the audience it deserves. Simply showcasing the budding talent of Audrey Tautou should be enough to generate greater recognition from the cognoscenti.

Lacking in pretension and relying on quirky characterizations, itÕs rumination on the interconnection of human behavior manages to be both amusing and life affirming and, unlike some of itsÕ more critically acclaimed competition in the genre, such as The Taste of Others, it actually entertains.

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

I found this film to be an interesting study in cause and effect but little more than that. The basic plot follows the lives of a handful of people and how their actions (deliberate and otherwise) effect the lives of the others. The film's premise holds great promise but I feel it fails to deliver on its promise. Too much time is spent telling the audience about chaos theory and too little time actually showing it. As a result, I never got a true feel for any of the characters and never made a good connection with them emotionally. By the end of the movie, I had a "so what" attitude about all of them. A stronger direction in character development would have made this movie great, but as it stands it is merely so-so