The laws of coincidence, chance, and fate, as we’ve learned from such films as Amélie, are unknowable. Those of movie marketing, however, are all too predictable: after Amélie became the highest-grossing foreign film in US box-office history, it was a safe bet that any previously unreleased film featuring ingenue Audrey Tautou’s elfin grin would be fair game.

Thus, Laurent Firode’s Happenstance, (2000; French title: Le battement d’ailes du papillon, or "The Beating of the Butterfly’s Wings"), which is like Amélie spread thin over a dozen characters and squeezed dry of cuteness and visual panache. There’s no shortage of contrivance, however: Firode takes two persons with the same birthday — Irène (Tautou), a shiftless checkout girl, and Younès (Faudel), a frustrated young Algerian waiter — and then traces the most indirect and unlikely routes by which their lives can intersect. After a while his interest in the characters gives way to a morbid fascination with the film’s house-that-Jack-built details and complexities, so that the adventures of a purloined coffeemaker or the progess of a cockroach across a countertop becomes more pressing than the desires and illusions of Irène and Younès. More wearying than scintillating, this first film nonetheless demonstrates a measure of wit and invention, so Firode’s own filmmaking fate may yet yield pleasant surprises.