User reviews

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When our intake of Brazilian cinema tends to be dominated by guns, violence and exotica, it is refreshing to experience a more refined slice of top-notch art-house.

Interlinking lives, interlinking roads, channel emotions to avoid collisions and pile-ups. And in the face of heart-wrenching loss that allows little freedom from harsh realities of circumstance.

Within this modern, teeming city of São Paulo, the relaxed warmth so typical of Brazilian communication pervades even the high tech control centre from which traffic is directed. To Enio, the swirling traffic is poetry in motion. Poetry he controls. Keep everything flowing. A blocked road, an accident, can have repercussions for a long way. He visualises pathways. Brings them to life on control screen. Issues instructions to controllers and traffic police on the ground. Tenderly looks after it all.

Across town, another caring control-freak sees pathways on the snooker board. Angles of incidence, angles of reflection. Backspins and follow-throughs. Forcing strokes and winning hazards. Like Enio, Pedro mathematically plans pathways of action and reaction. Mental flow-diagrams to help him win. But there is always an unknown factor. "Why practice a series not knowing what the other guy will do?" asks his beautiful but down-to-earth young lover.

Enio comes to a similar conclusion when reunited with estranged daughter, Bia: "We try so hard to foresee things . . . then something happens and we don't know what the consequences will be." Enio and Pedro control everything in their life. It becomes a metaphor to express their emotional outlook. But, when they both have to deal with sudden loss, their abilities to cope with the collision of emotions need something new. The structure of Not by Chance resembles the award-winning film, Crash. Though with rather subtler displays of emotion. Strangers' lives are distantly inter-related but with a gentleness that is deeply touching. Enio and Pedro must both make choices about new opportunities that life brings them.

A sudden outburst by Pedro's girlfriend recalls the righteous temper tantrums of women on all-encompassing Brazilian soap operas. Latin fieriness is institutionalised and used with crushing effect. As soon as Pedro relents, she is all soft and feminine again. His 'helpless' soulmate that gives up her more organised lifestyle and relishes flattering his male ego.

A curious aspect of Brazilian life is strangely explained. Enio shows his daughter how certain main roads are barred to traffic on special days. It might be a festival. A day set aside for joggers or children. Or simply, when pedestrians can use the extra space afforded by a main road. It is a luxury they allow themselves in a country which already has probably more official holidays than any other in the world. Brasilians know how to relax. Even in this metropolis. And it quietly suggests the idea of emotional space, the ability to deliberately prioritise it. (Something we perhaps find hard in the West to do).

Not by Chance has already won awards in the highly competitive Latin American film market. It is a deeply meditative, if surprisingly fast-moving film that allows the thoughtful viewer to contemplate the existential choices which life brings and how we handle them. Acting is first-rate without being flashy. Cinematography is also very impressive. From the google-earth style opening camera-work to subtle use of ghost images that let us into the protagonists' thoughts. Snooker never looked so exciting. Transitions from boardroom to bedroom are cleverly handled. But the ending, and the degree of control Enio exerts, seems a little improbable. We can allow it once we pick up on the symbolic nature of his actions. Or maybe even find it humorous. But a casual viewer might be left wondering, 'So what?'

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.