Is it Happenstance that I’m just now re-posting this review of the same-named 2001 French film, originally published upon its limited Stateside theatrical release late in the year? Hmmm…

A gimmicky yet remarkably spry tapestry about the “random
interconnectedness” of life in general and romance in particular,
writer-director Laurent Firode’s debut film opens by depositing two youngsters
with identical birth dates — low-key appliance store clerk Irene (Amélie’s Audrey Tatou) and restaurateur
Younes (Algerian singer-actor Faudel) — on the same train, and then spends the
rest of the movie detailing the various and sundry zigzags of fortune, glimpsed
only by the audience, that bring the two back together.

The sheer mania of this sort of jumbled causality is
captured in a much hipper, extroverted fashion in Guy Ritchie’s East End
knuckle-dusters (Lock, Stock and Two
Smoking Barrels, Snatch) and even
in something as passingly flip as Run
Lola Run, which spins out digressive, what-if story strands in a blinking
instant. Yet Happenstance, a
charming enough cinematic riff on chaos theory (consult Jeff Goldman’s Jurassic Park explanation if necessary), doesn’t find great
self-satisfaction in its structure. Despite the fortuitous and often comic
interactions between upwards of 20 strangers, what ultimately emerges as the
film’s backbone is the prequel to a love story, the events — or fate, if you
must — that bring two people together.

In the ensemble of Happenstance,
wide-eyed Tatou is certainly less of a central figure than she is in Amélie, yet the movies, radically
different in style and approach, interestingly offer a remarkably similar
preoccupation with destiny and good will, as well as several similar scenes
(including one in which Tatou is again trapped in the apartment of a senile old
biddy). Other characters include Luc (Eric Feldman), a tranced-out
twentysomething given to pathological lies of inversion; Bobby (Frederique
Bouraly), an old man taken in by a bartender’s explication of the cyclical
nature of karma; and Richard (Eric Savin), a disillusioned father torn between
his loveless wife and the gently nagging mistress, Elsa (Lysaine Meis), eager
to introduce him to her parents and legitimize their relationship. There’s also
a mysterious old codger who counsels a stranger — a proxy for the audience — that
every detail reveals an infinity of truths, and thus has grandiose repercussions.
(Or, more colloquially, you need only to piss in the sea to make the ocean
rise). The truth about Happenstance?
A bit slight, perhaps, but a well-made and immensely enjoyable watch. (Lot
47, R, 90 mins.)