Following the example of Krzysztof Kieslowski, a whole loose school of film has surfaced in the past few years to present the world as a place governed by fate, but knit together by an impossibly complex network of coincidence. The club is broad enough to include both major star items like Sliding Doors and less immediately multiplex-friendly fare like Run Lola Run. Eric Savin joins the club with his feature debut Happenstance, a film that illustrates just how facile the approach can seem when stripped of Kieslowski's metaphysical grace. Sharing a subway car and a birthday, Audrey Tautou (star of Amelie) and Faudel (in real life a French/Algerian pop star) both receive news that, within the day, they will meet their true loves. Without so much as a shared glance, they go their separate ways across a Paris whose hidden workings Savin reveals in one episode after another. A bird defecates on a photograph which, returned to a shopgirl, is found to contain a picture of her lost crush. Trying to decide whether to reveal his true feelings to his mistress, one man watches another throw stones against a statue, letting another's luck decide his own course of action. Eventually, all these events conspire to bring Tautou and Faudel toward the inevitable. For viewers who might miss the point, Savin even includes a cameo from a seemingly omniscient bald man who spells it out by saying, "There's not a gesture, even the most insignificant, that can't change the world." True or not, Savin's depiction makes a fairly unappealing case for whimsy and chaos as the governing forces of the universe. Introducing and discarding characters as it suits him, Savin treats even his leads as cogs in a great machine working joylessly toward a preordained conclusion. Seldom has an illustration of the certainty of chance seemed so overdetermined.