Audio By Carbonatix
Amélie, minus most of the charm. With that film’s star, Audrey Tautou, heading an ensemble cast, this romantic comedy is about how even the most random and mundane acts affect destiny. Every chance encounter between strangers has a repercussion, which leads to another interaction and another and another until, eventually, the picture’s star-crossed lovers, introduced in the first scene, meet. Writer-director Laurent Firode comes up with some clever and amusing situations, but his characters are all so glum and unlikable it isn’t a whole lot of fun to spend time with them. Happenstance was made a year before Amélie but is just now being released in the United States, making it difficult not to compare the two. The characters in Amélie had endearing foibles and eccentricities (even if morbidly sad or disgruntled, they were comically so); the characters in Happenstance are simply depressed or dull or uninteresting or downright misanthropic. The end result is that they and the film they inhabit fail to generate the kind of joie de vivre we have lately come to expect from the French.
