The Cinema of Converging Lives : Complex Films and Intersecting Stories in an Isolated World

What happens when strangers meet in film? The Cinema of Converging Lives explores a group of films within an important category of complex film, a genre that critics have hailed as proliferating worldwide in the 1980s and 1990s and continuing today.Lucy Fischer examines a recurring trope within this category which portrays disparate characters, mostly unacquainted and introduced separately, who eventually and often unexpectedly cross paths. The book focuses on underlying causes in each movie that drive the intersection of characters forward.It looks to 23 films by a diverse and international group of directors to consider how chance, coincidence, accident, history, geography, and the supernatural, as well as formal structures like metafiction and the circulation of possessions, drive these narratives.The book also highlights the irony of our clear interest in stories of converging lives on screen in an age of increasing isolation and loneliness.Finally, it offers a new look at complex