After a series of short films, writer/director Laurent Firode made his feature-length debut with this tale of coincidence, chance, and fate inspired by a variation of the chaos theory, which supposes that if a butterfly beats its wings in one part of the world, it could theoretically cause a full-fledged storm thousands of miles away. Firode applies this theory to a disparate group of Parisians, opening with a young retail worker, Irene (Audrey Tautou), reading her horoscope on the train to work one morning. At the store, Irene has to deal with an elderly woman (Francoise Bertin) who wants to return a broken coffeemaker; as if that weren't enough, the dissatisfied octogenarian consumer has to put up with her impudent grandson, Luc (Eric Feldman). Amidst all the seemingly unrelated human activities in the film, cockroaches, bird droppings, and changes in the weather all conspire to bring the characters together -- or drive them apart, as the case may be. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide
Happenstance is a 2000 French film starring Audrey Tautou and Faudel. Le Battement d'ailes du papillon is its original French title and is sometimes known by the literal translation, The Beating of the Butterfly's Wings. The title references the Butterfly effect from chaos theory which is quoted at greater length by one of the characters in the film.
Synopsis
Audrey Tautou plays a shop assistant on the way to work who takes a seat on the Paris metro opposite an older woman who tries to interview Tautou for a marketing survey. On hearing Tautou's birthdate is 11 March 1977, the woman reads her horoscope : today she'll meet her true love, but she must be patient. After Tautou leaves the metro, a young man sitting alongside (Faudel) tells the older woman he was born on the same day and asks her to read the rest of the horoscope.
The film then traces a range of characters of diverse ages, ethnicities and social status whose daily lives intersect with Tautou and Faudel's in a variety of gratuitous ways and come together in an implausible ending at the end of the day.
A Franco-African woman nightwatchman shoos a sleeping tramp from a building. He later becomes the centre of events at a metro where other characters come together, and, later in the movie, recount the event from diverse perspectives. A young man seeking a job at a museum, delayed by the incident at the metro, arrives for the interview late and is hired by a young woman who agrees to meet him across the road for a coffee. He waits in the café where two other characters are sitting independently. One is a man trying to find the courage to break up with his wife or his mistress; unable to decide, he uses the outcome of the actions of the man at the next table to determine what to do. The woman at the museum writes the new employee's name on a piece of paper, cuts it into the separate letters, and shuffles them around until she finds that they form the anagram of a pederast. The throwing of stones, a shoe and other trivial events determine the decisions and lives of the many characters.
Commentary
The film relies heavily on the notion of chance and happenstance interacting in unpredictable ways on people's lives. It is a film whose action/plot appears heavily driven by the underlying chaos theory that gives the French film its title. This may be seen as giving the film an unnatural naturalism where the auteur's hand rest heavily on the lightness of the chaotic mechanisms.
