movie of the week
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday March 22, 2010
The title might suggest a new action adventure involving 007 but no, this is a sly, whimsical comedy with a notable lack of super-charged Aston Martins, ballistic biff and trans-global megalomaniacs.Arguably more enjoyable, it revolves around a shop assistant, Irene, who is thrown into a state of high anxiety en route to work when her horoscope in the morning paper predicts she will find the love of her life before day is done.Irene is played with familiar wide-eyed wonder by the elfin Audrey Tautou and her sense of anticipation is, not surprisingly, sharpened as a direct consequence of this prognostication.The prophecy is duly fulfilled €” not in a direct, linear fashion but rather via a serendipitous sequence of cause-and-effect scenarios determined by the butterfly effect.This popular maxim suggests that a tiny, seemingly insignificant event can trigger a sequence of related episodes that may €” depending on the fickleness of fate €” create ripples in the pond of destiny so that the infinitesimally small current of air created by a butterfly's beating wings in an Amazonian rainforest can, in the right conditions, trigger a typhoon in another part of the globe.There are more than six degrees of separation in the chain of occurrences that unfold when Irene locks on to the prediction.The connection between Irene, born March 11, 1977, and an Algerian waiter who shares the same birthday, is far from obvious as cascading consequences flow over chance, volition and other vagaries of the cosmic order. Que sera sera, y'all!Joining nearly two dozen assorted characters in a chain of happenstance isn't a terribly difficult contrivance. It worked well enough in Arthur Schnitzler's circular, anti-syphilis drama La Ronde (1900), which was reworked almost a century later by playwright David Hare as The Blue Room, with Nicole Kidman's bare bottom playing a major role.The connections here are, in some instances, a trifle trite and the film was marketed in some places as Amelie 2 to cash in on Tautou's success in Amelie €” despite it being made a year earlier.Tautou radiates the unspoiled charm of Audrey Hepburn and the film's underlying element is that goodness will be rewarded when worlds collide, miss one another by a whisker or pass in the night. Various aspects of providence as conjured by horoscopers, tarot readers, the vendors of lottery tickets €” and the rest €” advance the dynamics of fractal chance.The story ricochets like a pinball on to the flippers of karma.It's jaunty, capricious and, cheerfully optimistic.Doug Anderson
© 2010 Sydney Morning Herald
