Un couple épatant

Although "Un couple épatant" is just 1 installment of Belvaux's impressive "Trilogy," I'm going to review it as a standalone film. This is because Belvaux deliberately made each film very different in story, genre and style, so we can guess that he intended for each film to be its own independent "dot" which we, the audience, must connect on our own time. Whether you're watching all three, or just this 1, here's what you can expect...

"Un couple épatant" is broadly a romantic comedy. But it has a very characteristic bite to it. The film is marketed in the USA with the title "An Amazing Couple", but the literal translation is more like "a shocking/unconventional couple." That might better prepare you for what is to come. The story hits the ground running and doesn't let up for a second. In the opening scenes we see that our hero "Alain" (François Morel) learns that he may have a terminal condition. He loves his wife deeply and wants to protect her from worry, so he hides this knowledge by telling her a passing lie. However our heroine "Cécile," who also loves her husband incontrovertibly, catches him in this tiny fib and this sets off a chain reaction of bigger lies & deception. In a WONDERFULLY orchestrated Shakespearean comedy of errors, these deceptions escalate to outright paranoia as Cécile's suspicious nature itself arouses Alain's suspicious nature, and bizarre coincidences give off appearances that each is having an extramarital affair. As each scene gives rise to more & more hysteria, we reach a fever pitch where actual infidelity, violence and murder aren't out of the question.

Maybe now you understand the title of my review. This is a dark, dark comedy. A romcom for cynics or at least for people who can laugh at the dirty underbelly of love. The tension builds almost painfully, even though we can't help but chuckle at how bizarrely perfect this series of events is. It brings to mind the great writer/director Francis Veber ("La cage aux folles"/"Birdcage") as far as mapping out a wonderfully tangled web of lies and misunderstandings. And although I wouldn't call this laugh-out-loud funny, I would definitely say this is one of the most cleverly written romantic comedies of its decade.

A few words about the acting and casting. François Morel is absolutely perfect as our hero Alain, portraying the role with a sort of goofiness while at the same time being intelligent and painfully intense. His schtick is that he is narrating his own life by talking into a small tape recorder the whole time, and this technique works magnificently; we really see and hear him losing his mind in a hilarious way.

Ornella Muti ...wow, a moment of silence for the talented and supernaturally beautiful Ornella Muti (Emperor Ming's daughter in 1980's "Flash Gordon"!)... um where was I? Right. Ornella Muti plays her role very seriously, with no hint of any comedic twang, and this lends itself to a very unusual and bipolar sort of comedy. Just as François's scenes are goofy and surreal, Ornella's scenes are powerfully gritty and realistic. If you grasp what this film (and the entire Trilogy) is trying to do--portray the same reality in starkly different ways--then you'll get it. Is this a romantic comedy, or is it a romantic horror story? Both at the same time.

There are supporting roles (actors who play major roles in the other 2 films) which are expertly played, but I have to make a special note of Gilbert Melki who plays the villain "Pascal". Wow. At first I hated him. He hits us with an extremely menacing, threatening, outright loathsome character... especially if you know his backstory from Part 1. But after the film ended I realized that he was perfect for the role. This story really did need an element of dark menace otherwise it would've been too breezy and silly for what it sets out to accomplish. But the character Pascal, as much as you want to reach into your screen and punch him, is what pulls this together and ties it in with the rest of the trilogy.

Yes, this is a "romcom". But it's a romcom in the same way that Tang is orange juice. In other words, beware of toxic additives. Things are not what they seem.

Alain is the manager of a small company. He is on the way to be have a surgical heart operation and he his convinced that he is on the point to die. He hides his disease to his wife and records his testament. His wife who perfectly knows him has suspicion and asks herself if he has relations with other women as Claire, his secretary, for example. In order to be sure, she asks to Pascal, the husband of his friend Agnes, to conduct a survey on Alain comportment. But Pascal has also another most serious inquiry about a gangster escape, Bruno Le Roux. All these characters will be mixed in various situations. This first episode pf the trilogy is very interesting and well realised and it is a good beginning for the entire story, but can be seen independently.

Lucas Belvaux's trilogy of films is meant to be taken as one multi-faceted unit, and indeed it is best viewed as such. The first (as I saw them), "On the Run," was a `thriller' with the main character, a convicted terrorist (Belvaux himself), escaped to settle scores and look up an old flame (Catherine Frot) who has settled down with a family. There we got our first glimpses of a relationship between the escapee and the drug-addicted wife (Dominique Blanc) of a down on his luck cop (Gilbert Melki), and the first hints of the events in this second film, a romantic comedy, "An Amazing Couple" ("Un couple épatant"). The comedy is about a fearfully hypochondriac husband (François Morel) and his loving wife (Ornella Muti (DeLaurentiis' "Flash Gordon"!)) who is driven to suspicion. The trilogy ties up with a character study (or `melodrama'), "After the Life," about Melki's cop and Blanc's drug-addled wife. The romantic comedy and `melodrama' work fine as stand alones, and are even enriched by the angles explored and explained by the other films. Only the thriller is really hobbled by it's involvement with the other interwoven stories. All three should be seen together, though. Or, as a friend recommended, maybe I should just watch Kieslowski's `Three Colors' trilogy instead…?

This is mostly a well plotted and acted lighthearted farce about marriage, trust and fidelity, with serious issues not far below the surface.

Seeing this airy fare right after the darkness of 'On the Run' (part 1 of the Trilogy) gives an almost Zen like insight into the two sides of life – light and dark, silly and tragic, and how those two dance and interweave.

Yes, a few of the comic twists are a bit forced, but many more are clever and really amusing, and all the characters are simultaneously lovable and infuriating.

But most amazing is the chill one feels when the overlaps with 'On the Run' become apparent. Even more than "On the Run", "An Amazing Couple" is a far better film for being part of the bigger whole.

Interestingly the top professional critics were split on this film in particular, and on 'The Trilogy' as a whole, calling it everything from 'a masterpiece' to 'a self involved misfire' .

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.