In the first part of Lucas Belvaux's "Trilogy," I was shocked to discover that Agnes, a middle-aged, middle-class junkie in withdrawal, was supplied drugs by her husband, Pascale, a cop (Gilbert Melki) in the French city of Grenoble. From the onset, Pascal was not a character I was inclined to like--the disagreeable face of the establishment who jails the sympathetic school teacher Jeanne (Catherine Frot).
In the second film, "An Amazing Couple," Pascal declares his love to Cecile (Ornella Muti) the jealous and distraught wife who had asked him to investigate her husband in an investigation so stringent it borders on harassment. So it is a surprise to find Pascal become the hero of the film, "After the Life." As his story unfolds, the terrible cop is revealed to be a flawed and tender man, doing the best he can under enormously trying circumstances. My heart ached even for him.
"After The Life" is a melodrama about a marriage coming apart. In the first two films, Pascal's wife Agnes is also a mystery. A school teacher, she does not match preconceived notions of a drug addict, and her true self is hidden from both the audience and the people who know her. All three films cover the same period of time, and so we are thrown back to Alain's surprise birthday party, but instead of watching Cecile wait for her husband to arrive, we watch strung out Agnes down glass after glass of champagne – the same champagne she was drinking off-camera in "An Amazing Couple," where her public collapse was not essential to the story of Alain and Cecile.
Unlike the most famous of three-part series, Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather" or Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings," the three films in "The Trilogy" do not follow each other, but the relations between the films are much tighter than in Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colors." Every movie holds crucial information about the others: the experience of one watching "After The Life" enriches the memory of "On The Run" and "The Amazing Couple," and the three form a kind of mental puzzle. They can be seen in any order and, for the price of three movie tickets, you get enough material to construct dozens of variations in your head.
One particularly brilliant achievement of Belvaux's is the intimate access it affords to every character's story as bit players and central figures change roles. In Belvaux's deeply humanistic view of the world, anybody can become the hero of their own movie. When Alain follows Cecile late at night to see Pascal, while Agnes lies on her bed inside, hugging herself tight, shaking from the effects of morphine withdrawal, somewhere across town Jeanne is helping Bruno evade the cops: with every film, our sense of the events accumulates and shifts while we piece the interlocking stories together. It's all happening simultaneously, but it takes three films to see the complete picture. The result is deeply satisfying.
