Não Por Acaso

This is a film with good actors, good direction, very interesting elements and characters, but perhaps a too loose connection between all of that. OK, the two main characters are both men who control - either traffic lights or the white ball on a pool table. Death imposes unpredictable changes on their lives. Two women appear in their lives. From accepting the changes until eventual happy ends it is not easy for either of them. Those changes, however, are not very convincing, maybe not developed deeply enough. There is a feeling that the film opens too much the possibilities without putting everything together properly. The pace is not fast but the outcome seems in a hurry. What a pity... I did like the characters and their personal issues and idiosyncrasies. They deserved more.

'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.

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.

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.

Many Brazilian movies have the same problem: They got excellent people working on them and they achieve excellent technical quality, but the story's are just not interesting enough.

In Hollywood people manage to conceal this non-interesting story's by putting enormous amount of visual effects, or situations that are made to impress the audience. In those case you can actually see this not-so-great story's and actually like the movie because you get so impressed by all that show, that you kinda forget that the story was no big deal.

But in Brazil, you don't have money to blow up entire sets or whatever, so it is fundamental that the story is extremely interesting.

IN this films case, it is a very well-made movie, but the story is slow and you can't really get excited or touched by the characters drama. I left the theater with the impression "well, it wasn't a bad movie ... but it wasn't good either." It was a common story, with a common ending, and the developing of the story, that should be the thing that would make a difference, was also ordinary.

So, for a movie that can't add more than all the others, it should get an average vote : a 5.