With his signature cold, cerebral style, his long slow takes, and meticulous action, Austrian director Michael Haneke (CACHE, THE PIANO TEACHER) presents a series of isolated scenes of unrelated people that culminates in an act of sudden and senseless violence in a bank. 71 FRAGMENTS OF A CHRONOLOGY OF CHANCE delves into some of the prevalent themes of Haneke's earlier films THE SEVENTH CONTINENT and BENNY'S VIDEO: existential isolation, the oppressive force of contemporary western civilization, the effects of television on human experience, and sudden inscrutable violence. Similar to Antonioni, Haneke has become one of the contemporary cinema's greatest provocateurs, deliberately withholding crucial information and denying any audience expectation. The eerie and beautiful 71 FRAGMENTS OF A CHRONOLOGY OF CHANCE hovers between a terrible nihilism and a tenuous humanism.
