Happenstance

There may be room for only so much serendipity in our lives, yet movies keep bombarding us with the stuff ' most recently, Serendipity, in which John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale arm-wrestled with fate and fate finally won. (Surprise.) And hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen, because the winds of change and chance are blowing again, this time from France. Laurent Firode's Happenstance imagines a world where everything and everybody are connected, its various characters floating past one another like bubbles. Such movies are only as interesting as the bubbles themselves, of course, and Firode deftly sketches them in ' the pathological liar, the philandering husband, the bossy mom, etc. Only a lonely salesgirl played by AmÃlie's Audrey Tautou seems genuinely sweet, and through some serendipitous combination of astrology and karma, the movie rewards her for that. The whole thing struck me as rather predictably unpredictable, but there's always the chance it'll work for you. So why not press your luck?