The Trilogy

* * * *

Movies offer visual feasts that are unlike the cognitive acrobatics required when reading a novel. Because movies play out visually what’s lost to the audience is all of the pre-story, back-story, in-between story. In a novel, even in a well written short piece, much of this information can be related, but movies are limited to strict time-frames. The Trilogy, written and directed by Lucas Belvaux, is a cinematic answer to that problem. Three films, shot simultaneously, describe not only different stories, but each in a different genre. With this, Belvaux gives us film as literature.

All three stories, On the Run, An Amazing Couple, and After the Life are placed in present day Grenoble. The films follow a number of different people, all within a two-week period in their lives. Much like Kurosawa’s Rashamon, these three story’s are all told from different perspectives with major characters from one film playing minor characters in another. These concentric circles draw the audience in deeply, and by the third film perception begins to take on the feeling of a fun-room mirror at the circus. Belvaux’s intent is that we experience the three genres of thriller, comedy, melodrama while dwelling within the same narration, and he does this very well.


1. On the Run

Bruno Le Roux (Lucas Belvaux) escapes from prison, but he cannot escape reality. On the lam, Bruno returns to Grenoble, where he plans to take care of unfinished business. Primary on his list is to kill the man he believes is responsible for his capture and life-sentence. Secondary, is his belief that the Marxist cause still lives, and that the masses will rise up once he has renewed the terrorist activities that caused his incarceration. But, much has changed in twenty years, and the flame of rebellion is no longer available for his fanatical approach to change. This thriller follows Bruno along a path of killing and hiding. Finally, he is forced to realize that the world has passed him by, yet in true fashion he remains a rebel to the end. While he could simply be smuggled into another country and live his life in freedom he chooses another path, more suited to his style. This movie has one of the most perfect endings I’ve ever seen.


2. An Amazing Couple

Cecile Costes (Ornella Muti) and Alain Costes (Francois Morel) are a happily married couple until a stream of poorly communicated events threatens to tip their life into disaster. Cecile is a high-school teacher, and Alain is a successful attorney who loves his wife so much that he decides to hide an upcoming surgery from her so that she won’t worry. What ensues is a scene by scene revelation of two people who are so paranoid and suspicious that one communication error leads to another with both feeling that the other has something to hide. Cecile believes that Alain is having an affair, while he begins to believe that she is plotting to have him killed. She has him followed, tracks his moment by moment activities and goes through everything in his office. He convinces his secretary that Cecile is trying to do away with him, and the two of them work to overturn the fantasized plot. This comedy is sometimes darkly illustrated but it has tremendously funny moments.


3. After the Life

This is the most riveting performance of the three films. Pascal Manise (Gilbert Melki) is a cop whose daily involvement in the grimier side of Grenoble life is only a side-show event to his personal life. Agnes Manise (Dominique Blanc), his wife, is addicted to morphine, and the central conflict arises from the fact that he has become her supplier in order to keep her love. When events from the other movies interfere it becomes impossible for him to supply her habit, and their once stable relationship begins to unravel. Dark from the start, this film tells us a story about a man we thought we knew, but in the end a totally different opinion is formed about the character of Pascal.

There are many surprising moments in these three films. I would love to tell you more but take the time to go to Madstone and see all three. This is, I predict, one of the better film events of the year.