The Belgian director's trilogy, number two as shown in the US, but shown first in French theaters, this is a domestic comedy (the title is ironic) about a hypochondriac and increasingly paranoid small tech business owner Alain (Francois Morel) who runs around hiding from his wife that he's going to have a very minor operation because he absurdly thinks it's going to be the death of him. His wife Cecile (Ornella Muti) senses that he's sneaking around and, thinking he's having an affair, gets her friend Agnes' cop husband (Gilbert Melki) to follow him, which makes him more paranoid. Eventually things end up at the chalet where Belvaux's escaped political prisoner character (central in the Cavale/On the Run panel) is hiding--the chalet being the main link with other episodes. This is generally and not without reason considered the weakest of the three films in The Trilogy. It's thin and repetitious pretty much throughout, and though poised as a comedy, its main character's obsession with death is hardly funny.
As one French critic wrote, he might have done better if he'd just made one good film. Mahohla Dargis wrote that 'The Trilogy' was "more conceptually fascinating than cinematically engaging." "'The Trilogy'" (she also wrote) "is nothing if not a logistical coup. Inspired by the way genre determines meaning, Belvaux used three editing teams to shape his overlapping stories and the results are (these three films)." In the third, which I haven't seen yet, 'Apres la vie'/'After the Life,' the genre is drama (or melodrama) and in it Melki, the cop, falls in love with Cecile, the wife who's hired him to investigate her husband. It's generally agreed that Melki shines in 'The Trilogy'. I also like Catheriine Frot, who is important in 'Cavale.'
Belvaux's 'Trilogy' is good potential material for a film course (comparison of genres, alternate takes, etc.), but the basic content of each film could be better. The hope with Belvaux's 'Trilogy' has to be that the whole is more than the parts.
