Un couple épatant

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.

A few minutes into the movie «Un couple épatant», after you recover from the startling first impression and acknowledge a categorical change of genre in the second installment of Lucas Belvaux's trilogy, the film flows at a rapid pace, as the story advances and unravels the chain of misunderstandings that lead the titular couple to suspect each other of adultery. Belvaux goes from the violent drama of "«Cavale» to the comedy of errors with precise humor and feline grace, and those who have seen the first installment will know that there is a dramatic background, represented by the characters of that other story. However, even without knowing their personal histories in depth (the man hiding in a country house, the arrested woman, the drug addict and her policeman husband), all fit like clockwork in this story: lawyer Alain (Morel), an obsessive hypochondriac, dramatizes a minor surgery and hides it from his wife Cécile (Muti). He begins to dictate his last will to a tape recorder (a testament that is modified every time his affection for his inheritors changes, according to the plot twists) and entangles his loyal secretary Claire (Mairesse) and his medical friend (Mazzinghi) in the farce. But Cécile smells something fishy and does not sit on her hands: she hires the services of policeman Pascal (Melki). Things get more and more complicated with every gesture, word or action, which have an opposite charge to the real one, according to each spouse's perception. Belvaux's narrative skill is in top form and leaves us curious about the closing of the trilogy. After this change of register, from a stark drama to a paranoid comedy, my curiosity about the outcome was awakened.