Rating: R
Genre:
Comedy Drama
Release Date: 04/23/2002
SubTitles: English
Dubbed: French
Sound: DS
Run Time: 97 Minutes
Distributor/Studio: New Yorker Video
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