THE TRILOGY TWO:
An Amazing Couple
(Un couple épatant)
Belgium/France
2003 : Lucas BELVAUX : 123 mins
Programme Notes
One 24-hour period
in Grenoble. Three films, three genres: thriller, comedy, and melodrama. Three
very different couples. All audaciously intertwined in this groundbreaking trilogy
of films. An outstanding cinematic achievement.
"To see all three is to see a fourth film." Director, Lucas Belvaux
Review from Neil Young's Film Lounge (www.jigsawlounge.co.uk)
Slots alongside After Life [see above] and On the Run as part of Belvaux's wildly
ambitious trilogy, in which the three movies work OK individually, but add up
to something surprisingly effective and memorable when seen in conjunction with
each other. According to Belvaux, the films can be seen in any order and stand
on their own. Impossible to say on the former, but latter is only partly true.
An Amazing Couple is the only comic picture in the trilogy other two are much
more dour affairs. Light, very 'French' French farce of marital paranoia, with
darker edges where it rubs up against the other two movies. Husband (Francois
Morel) and wife (Ornella Muti) keep getting the 'wrong end of t he stick' and
presumptions of infidelity multiply into absurdity. Film is all about the dangers
of making presumptions based on partial information: very ironic, that, given
the judicious parcelling-out of information which constitutes Belvaux's storytelling
style over the course of the trilogy.
As with After Life, competent and absorbing/entertaining, thanks in no small
part to central performance though Morel's turn as the hapless Alain is much
less gruelling than Dominique Blanc's drug-addict Agnes from the other picture.
Also shares with After Life problem of slightly disappointing finale doesn't
build to the major farce climax we'd been expecting, and, as someone remarks
at a pivotal moment, 'It's arbitrary'. Slight tailing off, with 'to be continued'
air hanging over things.
After having seen two episodes, this reviewer is very keen to complete the Trilogy
with On the Run but is this project really worth six hours' running time? And
this translates to a much greater commitment from audiences as they'll be expected
to spread the Trilogy over three different trips to the theatre. Faced with
this kind of format-stretching originality, critics instinctively over-react
the Trilogy isn't a masterpiece, but the structure of the whole gives each movie
a particular atmosphere: part-game, part-puzzle, part grand artistic folly.
Review by Peter Bradshaw
Friday November 28, 2003
The Guardian [Read
The Review Here]
Lucas Belvaux's trilogy now moves on to its second part, subtitled An Amazing
Couple. The first was noir thriller; this is frantically complicated farce,
revealing that, as Stoppard says in his Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, every
exit is an entrance somewhere else. Belvaux's fugitive terrorist, hiding out
in the chalet in Trilogy: One, makes a fleeting appearance here, though with
his criminal credentials invisible. François Morel plays Alain, a hypochondriac
businessman muttering his symptoms and angoisse into a dictaphone; his secret
hospital appointments make his wife Cécile (Ornella Muti) suspect he
is having an affair.
Buoyant and watchable stuff, though I've now got to confess to a slight, sinking
sense of disappointment with this trilogy, for which such extravagant claims
have been made. The shifts in perspective disclosed in this second movie are
frankly not that dazzling, and the generic superimpositions on a single set
of characters have not delivered any really stunning insights - yet. But it
doesn't stop me looking forward to the third instalment next week. (See it here
after An Amazing Couple)