Writer/director Laurent Firode‘s 2000 film Happenstance (Le Battement d’ailes du papillon) is a fabulous French-language romantic comedy starring Audrey Tautou, one of my favorite actresses, as Irene, the leading character. It is a romantic comedy that uses its simplicity to showcase the elements of Chaos Theory or the Butterfly Effect, where one action leads to a series of progressively larger actions so that, for example a butterfly in Indonesia can cause a hurricane in Florida.

This adaptation of the book does nothing but shave off the important and interesting parts of the novel and then tries to cram what’s left into a more-or-less cookie-cutter Hollywood plot, and ineffectively, at that. Director Ron Howard casts Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Paul Bettany, and Alfred Molina in what can best be described as an interpretation of the plot as conceived by author Dan Brown.  Robert Langdon (Hanks) is a respected symbologist and is called to the Louvre late at night to find a mysterious murder scene. 

This will be my first entry in a series of profiles of directors I believe have made a serious and consistent contribution of quality movies.  It is an annotated list of movies directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet which I have seen and which are available for purchase in DVD format, at the very least, and encoded properly for viewing in North America.  I have left off some titles mostly due to limited availability or in one case because he is still working on the project.  They are predominantly subtitled from French with the exception of Alien: Resurrection.   Jeunet is one of my favorite directors if for no other reason than when I see a movie he has directed, I have yet to find one I disliked.

Having found success three years ago with Amelie Jeunet moves to this story of a romantic relationship between Mathilde (Audrey Tatou) and her lover, a soldier fighting in World War I.  A Very Long Engagement tells its story by reflecting upon the lives of five soldiers who have been caught during the war injuring themselves in order to get sent home.  The military finds out and decides to send these troops beyond the front-line to have the German soldiers kill them.

Amelie was my first introduction into movies from this particular director and is what I believe to be his second strongest film following The City of Lost Children.  For those who haven’t yet seen it, it is highly recommended.  It is very light-hearted and positive, following the life of Amelie Poulin (played by Audrey Tatou), a twenty-something waitress at a Parisian restaurant who decides to become a do-gooder who helps others better their lives and in the process betters her own life as well.