THE TRILOGY THREE:
After Life
(Après la vie)
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 by Peter Bradshaw
Friday December 5, 2003
The Guardian [Read
Full Review Here]
With its third and final instalment, subtitled After Life, Lucas Belvaux's
trilogy closes with a satisfying click. The first two were, respectively, thriller
and farce; this is a melodrama, effectively conflating the tone of the previous
two.
The focus is now on Pascal (Gilbert Melki), the tough cop whose wife Agnès
(Dominique Blanc) has been a morphine addict for 20 years. Secretly, Pascal
gets her drugs from local super-villain and former terrorist Jacquillat (Patrick
Decamps), who now says he will cut off the supply unless Pascal tops his inconvenient
former associate Le Roux (Belvaux), whose daring and slightly implausible prison
breakout we saw in the first movie.
This one centres on the anguished, even tragic love between Pascal and Agnès,
which is not diminished by Pascal's infatuation with another woman. It is their
relationship and the two excellent performances from Melki and Blanc that finally
give some moral and emotional weight to this clever movie-triangle.
But I couldn't help wondering if it might not after all have been better to
have developed a longer and more deeply felt version of this third part, without
those initial detours into pastiche-noir and tongue-in-cheek farce.
Review by Philip French
Sunday December 7, 2003
The Observer [Read
Full Review Here]
Trilogies are like buses: you stand there for ages and then three come along
at once. Last month, The Matrix trilogy was completed; in a fortnight we'll
have the last instalment of The Lord of the Rings; and in between we've seen
the three episodes of Lucas Belvaux's sequence, culminating in Trilogy Three
(After Life).
Unlike the Wachowski brothers' films and the Tolkien trio, which proceed chronologically,
Belvaux's movies are less a triptych than a palimpsest, being superimposed on
each other as they cover the same set of events over a couple of days in Grenoble.
Benjamin Franklin remarked to his fellow founding fathers: 'We must indeed all
hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.' I think Belvaux's
pictures do hang together and, indeed, only the first in which Bruno, a ruthless
terrorist, returns to Grenoble after 15 years in jail, is truly free-standing.
The pattern that emerges is that of three schoolteachers and their trouble with
men - Jeanne (Catherine Frot), a former associate of Bruno; Agnès (Dominique
Blanc), who harbours Bruno while her policeman husband pursues him; and the
supposedly happily married Cécile (Ornella Muti), in whose mountain chalet
Bruno is hidden.
With each part of the trilogy, our view of the characters changes as we see
them from different angles. Bruno, the unreconstructed terrorist stuck in the
past (played by Belvaux himself), is the person we initially identify with.
By the end, he has become a plausible monster, alien to us. And the movie culminates
in a deeply affecting scene involving a couple who, for much of the way, are
rather unsympathetic. It's all rather like Odd Man Out rewritten by Alan Ayckbourn.