Happenstance by Laurent Firode (2000)
19 January 2009I have to admit I picked up this film because of Audrey Tautou, as she is lovely and quirky, almost inhuman actually, and I a huge fan. And while I did enjoy this film, I was disappointed to see that she was in fact only in a small part of the film, in the open, the middle and the end. The film is all about Happenstance, and how the littlest things connect each person together, and connect events and people together. The film is well done, and really does flow together, though doesn’t come out as too deep. Still I kept thinking how hard it must have been to film with so many characters, and it supposed to be taking place in such a short period of time, what a production it must have been. Worth seeing at least once, though not amazing, still enjoyable.
Audrey Tatou plays Irène a young woman on a train, who works selling kitchen appliances, who gets chatted up by a woman doing a marketing survey, who when she hears her birthdate of March 22th, 1977 reads her her horoscope about her meeting her true love today, but being patient as it will take a while. When Irène leaves, the young man next to her Younès (Faudel) asks to hear the rest of the horoscope as that was his exact birthday as well. From here we jump to a series of seemingly unrelated events all happening around, and somehow connected to each other.
REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS….
We see an illegal immigrant sneaking into the country. A homeless man is sick and kicked from his sleeping place by a black woman. He then collapses in the subway, and one man does nothing, while a thief calls the cops, and ends up getting arrested for smoking in the subway. The young man shows up late for a job interview and lies about it, saying he saved the man, and tries to get a date with the woman, but she mixes up his name on a piece of paper and reads that he is an asshole.
In another town a drunken man crashes into a ditch because of some vegetables in the road accidently dropped by the immigrant from a truck. A young boy sees the man and thinks him his head father, so the mother goes to London to see her husband. The man is having an affair, but can never make up his mind, and instead dreams of what he should do, but doesn’t do it.
We see the man who got a job go with his mother to see his granmother who has bought a coffee machine that doesn’t work, and she goes to try and return it, but has trouble and another man steals one for her, but doesn’t find her, and Irène gets fired for not catching the guy, and ends up having to head home, but gets in a car accident in the taxi and heads to the hospital.
Younès gets given a raincoat, which belonged to the thief, and gets attacked by Irène’s roomate whose bag was stolen and also ends up at the hospital for his nose.
The immegrant finds his family, and brought sand from home, which gets blown out the window and makes Irène and Younès meet each other.
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Cute, and a logistal nightmare to make. Certainly worth checking out this pain on Chaos theory and how everything effects all those around them.
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