Review: A Chance Encounter (2022)

Alexander Jeffery’s A Chance Encounter (2022) is a meandering rivulet of melodies and verses trickling inconspicuously— almost timidly— down a long, narrow crevice in the hard rock of human existence. The film feels like a sad folklore being hummed by a woebegone wayfarer trudging aimlessly through the wine-dark mists of dusk. It’s a story of how we humans are seeking one another everywhere— writing and singing and pleading for that human touch, for that tenderness in the warmth of the beloved. It’s a story also of transcending the boundaries of humans and merging with a passing melody, with the whispers of the wind, the colors of the sunset, and the noise that entombs us everywhere, every day.

“Aspiring poet” Hal has come all the way from Iowa to the Sicilian town of Taormina to write. At least, that’s what he tells himself. He doesn’t know what he might discover in the pages of his journal. In fact, deep down, he knows he can’t separate his life from his words. He meets one day against the cheerful backdrop of a bright Sicilian sky American singer Josie Day. Josie has a hit single to her name and now is pensively walking the Sicilian streets, waiting eagerly for the time when a new melody will strike her unawares and give birth to her next song.

Hal meets Josie at a time when they both are searching for a deeply personal expression of being human. Adrift in a sea of uncertainties, having surrendered their will to the poetry of a Sicilian god, they wander around the city, as friends, as strangers, partaking in the mundane affairs of civilization. The film as a whole is only an introduction to a feeling. It is merely a spark, and it is not a fire. It’s very evanescent. It lingers not too long; nothing in the film lingers long— it is like waves that hit the shore one after the other, like a breeze that hits the nostrils with faint aromas of an ever-changing universe. It is a strange quality for a film to have. Its beauty is in its perishing too soon, in leaving behind nothing but an early morning’s freshness, a pleasant stupor, and a vast and open field.

The streets of Sicily, Oscar Wilde’s residence, the villa that they stay in, the various restaurants they visit, the wine glasses, and the mountain ranges— all bear witness to a kind of relationship which is not made of the usual familiarity of a known world, it’s not made of familiar invocations of a dying love, it’s not made of the familiar expectations and familiar disappointments. What they bear witness to is a kind of relationship that forms as does poetry— word by word to conjure something mysterious and true, but never to preserve its own flavor, only to be consumed in its own flame and taking birth anew as a new verse.

Josie talks about her tensions with her boyfriend. Hal mentions that the death of his mother has brought him to Sicily, that he is grappling with loss, and all meanings are fading in him to open a chasm that he feels he must explore. So, as they slowly reveal to each other the stories of their lives, they find themselves in a sadness that nurtures a beautiful love. This love is beyond all declarations of love, it’s a love that’s merely being together, silently, in poems, in songs.

Jean Cocteau writes on filmmaking: “Marvels and Poetry are not my affairs. They must ambush me. My itinerary must not foresee them. I am cheating if I opine that a certain shady place is more favorable than another to shelter them. For it may happen that a road exposed to full sunlight shelters them better”.

Jeffery has co-written the script with Paul T.O. Peterson (who plays Hal), and even though some elements of the Sicilian setting could have been better utilized, the film speaks in a very original tone. Jeffery hasn’t “foreseen” poetry. Poetry has found him. That’s quite clear. The film has many themes which were present in The Before Trilogy, especially one of discovering a kind of love that is both personal and impersonal. Though it’s not as well made as The Before Trilogy, it is fundamentally a simple story simply told— something that might take it a long way.