The bold, experimental success of "The Trilogy."
It's one of the oldest rules in filmmaking: To give a movie a pulse, one must fill it with characters so vivid that even if they have just a few lines, viewers can still imagine what their lives might be like when they're not onscreen. The most beloved movies achieve this feat. Casablanca, for example, offers characterizations so precise that one can imagine separate films about Peter Lorre's desperate hustler or Sidney Greenstreet's self-satisfied fat cat. The backstory of Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa could make a splendid movie all its own. It's also interesting to consider how the same set of characters might behave if they appeared in, say, a romance as opposed to an action picture, or a psychological thriller instead of a slapstick comedy.
I often find myself speculating on the lives of characters that aren't at the center of movies, or wondering if I would find the same lead characters as believable in a different genre. Consider the 1989 Walter Hill movie Johnny Handsome. Early in the picture, the hero, a badly disfigured thief played by Mickey Rourke, gets experimental surgery to make him more attractive and then gets a job. The montage showing Johnny adjusting to the "straight" life plays like outtakes from a Bruce Springsteen video: a series of idealized images of burly Rourke working with machines that produce a lot of sparks. If you know the plot of the movie, or if you've ever seen a thriller in your life, you know that Rourke is fated to rejoin the criminal element because if he didn't, audiences would demand their money back. (Some did anyway.) But for a fleeting moment, I found myself wondering if I'd ever see a movie that started out, Johnny Handsome-style, with a heist gone bad, just like every other super-macho crime picture, then took a sudden left turn. Imagine a movie about a disfigured, brutal, nihilistic thief who gets surgery to make him handsome, then falls in love, gets married, has a son and tries to resist the temptation to break the law again when his child falls ill with a disease that's expensive to treat.
If you have any patience for this sort of woolgathering, you should see "The Trilogy," an amazing triptych of movies by Belgian filmmaker Lucas Belvaux. All include the same set of characters and unfold concurrently, within roughly the same span of time. But "The Trilogy" is not just the same story told three different ways; rather, each film is designed to satisfy people who enjoy pondering the sheer movie-ness of movies, and who ask themselves playfully speculative questions about form and content.
The first installment, On the Run, which opens Jan. 30 at the Angelika, is a terse, brutal thriller about a political revolutionary and bank robber (played by the director) who breaks out of prison after 15 years and tries to settle old scores. It has the clipped, slightly clinical viciousness of a Jean-Pierre Melville movie like Le Samourai or Takeshi Kitano's Yakuza thrillers. The hero, Bruno, is an inscrutable outlaw in the Bogart-Jean-Paul Belmondo mode?the kind of guy whose closed-off countenance gives no clue whether he's about to embrace you or blow your brains out.
The second film, An Amazing Couple, opening Feb. 6, features many of the same characters as On the Run, including a schoolteacher named Cecile (Ornella Muti) who supported Bruno's revolutionaries back in the day. But this movie is not a thriller. It's a slightly kooky romantic comedy, of the sort that European filmmakers used to do better than almost anyone. It revolves around the peculiar tension between Cecile and her husband Alain, a hypochondriac who fears that a routine operation will kill him and drops out of his own domestic life, leading his wife to believe he is having an affair. (Alain suspects the same of her.)
The third film, After the Life, zeroes in on Pascal (Gilbert Melki, whose dark-eyed magnetism suggests the young Al Pacino), a slightly shady cop investigating Bruno's escape and subsequent one-man crime wave. Pascal is married to Agnes (Dominique Blanc), a neurotic woman who teaches at the same school as Cecile and who happens to be a morphine addict. Pascal loves his wife so much that he uses his cop connections to get her clean morphine rather than risk having her go out into the street for a fix. (Their scenes together offer the most moving and intense dramatic moments in the entire trilogy; there are at least three scenes between them that Mike Leigh would be proud to have directed.) When Pascal accepts a job as a private investigator, checking out Cecile's husband for possible infidelity, he falls for Cecile; and Agnes, jonesing for a fix, turns to Bruno for assistance.
Belvaux's grandiose vision is tempered by a fierce concentration reminiscent of an old Hollywood movie director. He's no Howard Hawks?not yet, anyway. But he's clearly studied Hawks' career. Rather than bend each movie to fit the only style he's got (which is what passes for auteurist independence these days) he tries to adopt a different style for each picture, depending on its themes, characters and mood. On the Run is darkly lit, and chock full of elegant, nearly serpentine crane shots, pans and dollies. Bruno's drive away from the prison break is conveyed in a series of dreamy jump cuts taken from the backseat of the getaway car carrying Bruno and his buddy. When they run a roadblock, the cops' gunfire is conveyed with a flash of white; when the flash subsides, you realize the window is suddenly ripped by bullet holes and spiderweb cracks. He operates out of a storage locker packed with fake ID cards, guns, ammo and other crucial tools. Balvaux and cinematographer Pierre Milon light the space to suggest that the only illumination issues from a single gas lantern, lending Bruno's moments of planning and contemplation a dreamy, menacing, faintly mythic aura.
In contrast, An Amazing Couple is lit more brightly, and the action is often framed in static wide shots and close-ups, like a Hollywood comedy; After the Life uses a mostly handheld camera, the norm for intense, up-close dramas from Cassavetes through Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves. The same events are depicted twice, in two movies, in two styles, and acquire different feelings, meanings and functions. In On the Run, a disguised Bruno kills an old colleague, then watches from afar as the clueless Pascal interrogates witnesses at the crime scene. The same event recurs in After the Life, but we see it from Pascal's perspective. Bruno's face is never seen, because in both movies, Pascal never recognized Bruno in the crowd.
About halfway through An Amazing Couple, I began to feel uncomfortable and couldn't figure out why. At first I chalked it up to the usual anxiety one experiences while watching the second installment in a potentially promising series of movies and fearing that the whole may not amount to the sum of its parts. More specifically, I wondered if Belvaux would turn out to be nowhere near as adept at romantic comedy as he was at the moody, existential thriller?a classic example of a director going into a project hoping to demonstrate versatility, only to confirm that he has limits just like anyone.
But then I realized that my discomfort proved that "The Trilogy" was doing exactly what Belvaux wanted it to do; it was making me think about the relationship between form and content, and how that relationship affects the viewer. An Amazing Couple is not a great romantic comedy, but it is good; if I'd seen it by itself, not knowing it was intended as part of a conceptually ambitious trilogy, I might have enjoyed it and then forgotten all about it. Instead, I was thinking about On the Run, and feeling frustrated that many of the characters onscreen in An Amazing Couple could go on about the business of flirting, yearning and scheming, unaware that across town, a monosyllabic ex-revolutionary living out of a storage locker was roaming Paris like a vengeful spirit. The contrast between the obliviousness of the romantic comedy principles in An Amazing Couple and the icy savagery depicted in On the Run?and, for that matter, the imprecise, frequently startling passions displayed in After the Life?might be an analog for the difference between lives in the real world. For some people, the dramatic high point of the year is wondering if a spouse is cheating, or developing a crush on someone they barely know; for others, it's scoring drugs for a dependent wife or plotting to kill someone who betrayed you, the law be damned.
(Belvaux recently edited pieces of all three films into an extended, chronological cut. Another interesting note: On the festival circuit, "The Trilogy" began with the romantic comedy, then went to the thriller before finishing with the domestic drama. Belvaux has noted that viewers seem to feel that whatever order they watched the films in is the "right" order?proving the validity of his experiment while also suggesting that our minds have an infinite capacity to absorb and arrange information into patterns that make subjective, emotional sense.)
There are precedents for this kind of experiment. Alain Resnais' Smoking/No Smoking, the Jim Jarmusch masterpiece Mystery Train and the more recent romantic drama Sliding Doors?to name but a few?each used cinematic form to make us think about the different directions our lives might have taken if we had made one (perhaps small) decision, as opposed to another. They also make us think about the subjective narcissism by which we live our lives; everyone thinks he is the star of his own movie, with the rest of humankind serving as backup players or extras. But it's fun to think about these things, especially when the ideas are presented with an excellent, un-flashy, frequently breathtaking grasp of cinematic technique, and the many different uses to which it can be put. Belvaux makes you feel and think; I can't wait to see all three of these movies again, perhaps in a different order.