Not by Chance

I saw this film the other evening at a local Latin-American film festival. Some comments on this film describe it as slow, but the director was establishing a background that widens to include two separate stories originating in a car accident that kills the wife and the girlfriend of the film's central characters; of how those characters cope by dealing with women coming into, then almost exiting, their lives. I found the film subdued (and certainly not dull), the characters believable, their reactions to each other credible. The relationship of Pedro (the pool table carpenter) with Lucia, a businesswoman undergoing career problems, works well: they meet through a mutual contact, become interested in each other, then go through a difficult patch before (it is suggested) becoming reunited. Lucia was worried that he was trying to replace his dead girlfriend with her. Final note: the women, true to the country the film is set in, look good and are good to look at.

Following on the same device as used in Amorros Perros and Crash, Not By Chance uses a car crash to thread two stories together. In a car accident in Sao Paulo, a man and a woman in a car hit a girl and then crash, all three people getting killed. We then follow the lives of the girl's boyfriend and the former partner of the woman in the car. If there is a common thread in the two stories it's difficulties in communication: between the girl killed and her boyfriend and the daughter of the woman killed and her father. This is, however, a very loose thread and the two stories really look as they belong to two different movies.

Not bu Chance is, however, always interesting and very well acted. It does not quite achieve the fluency of the aforementioned films in neatly tying up these stories together but it's a welcome diversion from your usual Hollywood movie.

Imagine a palace with 1000 doors. You have to move in and out of the palace everyday, but you cannot open its doors. They open automatically for you...you just have to wait for a little while in front of them. But what if the doors take more time to open ? Or less time ? In fact your life could be definitely different. "Não por acaso" deals with this time issue: how a fraction of time could affect people's destiny and relationships. The plot takes place in a big city, whether it is São Paulo or New York, Paris or Buenos Aires makes no difference. Human touch is present throughout the movie, intermingled in urban scenes, where time flows in a slower and unrushed manner. This approach invites the viewer to a deeper reflection of the meaning of time in our 21st century global society.

Phellipe is a poet of image, since hi's short films, he write with poetry the image in movement, i have the honor to be hi's student, it's wonderful to see him for the first time in a cinema! Congratulations! In his first film, "The Stairs", i saw an different point of view of narrative, the man who upstairs, don't move it in any other side, so he put the camera in many point's of you don't see anything, just the stairs, so the man became a insane person because he couldn't move it, Barcinski make an idea about the lost of a mind control with the person, in this film, it's about the casualty in change's life in 2 second's, and the lost of the life control, so it's interesting to saw two point of view about the lose control of life and mind.

'Not by Chance' ('Não Por acaso') is set in São Paolo, Brazil. Its crossed-paths ('Amores Perros,'''21 Grams, 'Babel, 'Crash') plot structure is getting pretty tired by now, but this is a sophisticated and polished and engaging enough work to have been bought an overseas branch of Twentieth Century Fox. It's already on a US-region DVD.

We begin with Enio (Leonardo Medeiros), a weary traffic controller who works in a large visually impressive control room. Shortly after a reunion with his ex-wife Monica (Graziela Moretto), who tells him his daughter Bia (Rita Batata), now grown, wants to meet him, he spies an accident and, rushing to it on foot, miraculously in a few minutes, sees Monica and her current husband lying dead. Meanwhile inter-cut with Enio's story is one of a university student, Teresa (Branca Messina), who rents out her large apartment to move in with her boyfriend Pedro (Rodrigo Santoro), an expert pool player who, like his deceased father, builds pool tables. Teresa's mother incidentally, like Enio and Pedro, is a kind of control freak. Teresa's old flat's new occupant is Lucia (Leticia Sabatella), a commodities trader particularly interested in coffee. In the course of the film relationships will be rearranged.

There's a parallelism between Pedro's diagrams of pool play (which he talks through mentally in voice-overs) and Enio's ideas about fluid dynamics, which his boss wants to utilize in some sort of unspecified more "humane" traffic system (rather than a German system of "smart" traffic signals he's not keen on adopting). Traffic controlling as seen here is fabulously technical and precise, while pool and cabinetry of course are art forms. The symbolism avoids seeming too forced because each area of expertise is presented interestingly.

The trouble with these schemes of interconnection, stressing the dire--people do interconnect under positive circumstances, after all--and the arbitrary is that they will seem, well, arbitrary, cooked up by the screenwriters (and there were three, Barcinski, Fabiana Werneck Barcinski and Eugenio Puppo) to give a story a sense of life's complexities that only a long novel, or better yet a series of novels like Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time' or Anthony Powell's 'Dance to the Music of Time,' can really convey. Representing several clusters of characters in a film of just an hour or two runs the risk of feeling like a chopped-down TV miniseries.

Nonetheless this first feature shows Barcinski to be a fluent and accomplished filmmaker. He gives us a sense of urban anxieties with the focus on apartment-hunting and traffic snarls. It's cool the way he uses phantom images of the pool balls to show the player's control to contrast with the movements of a girl killed through a random error in traffic. Since this sort of story views life diagrammatically, Barcinski seems to feel, why not diagram it openly? And it works. What you can't diagram are joy and grief, and that's where the actors come in handy...

Compared to the Iñárritu, Haggis, or Haneke versions of this kind of s structure, Barcinski's has a gentle, laid-back Brazilian feel to it, especially as embodied in the character of Pedro. The finale is soothing. The trouble is that people are used to having their pulse rates raised much higher by just this kind of film. Barcinski's work will be worth watching, though.

Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival 2008.