Lucas Belvaux ends his trilogy with « Après la vie», with an ending that seems a happy one, but full of deep melancholy. If «Cavale» was an intense action drama and «Un couple épatant», an entertaining chain of entanglements, in this final installment he opts for realism in the style of films like «Born to Win» and «Taxi Driver». It is because this third film tells us with minutiae the relationship between the police Pascal and his wife Agnes, who is addicted to morphine. And to complicate matters, he is the one who supplies her with the drug. When the plots of the first two movies (the escape of an activist and the suspicion of adultery, respectively) cross their lives, everything becomes completely altered. The arrival of the fugitive suddenly makes Pascal aggressive and violent, because the supply of drugs stops. Pascal (Gilbert Melki, a good Belgian actor with the ideal face for a police drama) cannot control his wife Agnes (Dominique Blanc, extraordinary actress) with her dose at hand. When Agnes asks him for help, as detective to her friend Cécile (Ornella Muti), Pascal becomes confused. Cécile suspects that her husband is cheating on her, and, frustrated by his own emotional life impeded by Agnes' addiction, Pascal believes that he has fallen in love with Cécile. Other subplots are resolved and secrets revealed, as the relationship between the fugitive and a mean pusher, or the sudden confession of who was the real informer responsible for the activists going to prison. However, it is the Pascal-Agnes relationship that dominates the film: it becomes a desperate search for morphine, and absence of love in a harsh society. A great trilogy that I recommend not to miss if it comes your way.

I loved these three films - trilogy - as I discovered it back thirteen years ago. I loved the scheme, this symmetry existing between those three features, the scheme where a main character in one movie becomes a supporting one in the following one. This scheme reminds me Nicolas Winding Refn's PUSHER trilogy. The stories are not the same as in this trilogy, but the way of frame, structure of those tales is exactly the same. And so unusual too. I am surprised that no one has pointed it out yet. As far as I know, I have not watched such way of telling in any other trilogies. New ways of screen writing are very hard to make, I guess. They prefer the PULP FICTION one or those many movies where several fates collide between the characters. Lucas Belvaux is not a pretty good actor, his way of acting is not convincing at all, but as a director, he's different. He always gives us very interesting films.

I've just seen the trilogy on successive nights on Tele-Quebec. An Amazing Couple, said to be a comedy, is painfully bad: there isn't a joke worthy of the name throughout the full two hours. On The Run is better; it's a good little thriller about a man whose obsessions lead him to join a Baader-Meinhof-type gang. Finally, After Life is a character study of a dedicated detective who unknowingly marries a drug addict, then goes around desperately trying to score drugs for her.Here the actors finally come into their own. Dominique Blanc gives one of the best portrayals of somebody in the grip of addiction that I have seen. Her drug behavior is integrated into her personality in a very convincing way, not just sketched in. The overdose scene is powerful. Her marriage and her role as teacher are suffering from her habit, and she'll have to make a choice. Gilbert Melki shows the tenderness in his cop character; you can believe he'd wreck his career for his wife.

"On the Run (Cavale)" is the first third of an engrossing experiment in story telling that crosses "Rashomon" with a television miniseries to show us an ensemble of intersecting characters over a couple of days to gradually reveal the complicated truth about each. Writer/director Lucas Belvaux uses a clever technique to communicate just how differently the characters perceive the same situations-- they are literally in different movies and, a la "Rules of the Game," everyone has their reasons. "On the Run"is a tense, fast-paced escaped con on-the-run Raoul Walsh-feeling film, with the auteur himself playing a Humphrey Bogart-type who can be cruel or kind; "An Amazing Couple (Un couple épatant)" is an Ernest Lubitch-inspired laugh-out-loud comedy of mistaken communication; and "After the Life (Après la vie)" is a Sidney Lumet-feeling gritty, conflicted cop melodrama with seamy and tender moments. "Time Code" experimented turning the two-dimensions of film into three with multiple digital video screens. This trilogy is more effective in showing us what happens as characters leave the frame. Belvaux goes beyond the techniques used in the cancelled TV series "Boomtown" or the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu in "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams" with their stream-of-consciousness flashbacks character by character.I don't see how I can deal with each film separately. Theoretically, one can see the three movies alone or independently out of order, but that would be like watching one episode of a series like "The Wire" or "The Sopranos" and wondering what the big deal is. Only a handful of patrons in my theater joined me in a one-day triple-feature; I guess the others have a better memory than I do that they could see each film on separate days, though a marathon does inevitably lead to some mind-wandering that could miss important clues and revelations so this is ideal for a triple-packed DVD. On DVD we'll be able to replay the excellent acting to see if in fact the actors do shade their performances differently when particular scenes are enacted from different characters' viewpoints -- are these takes from the same staging or not? How is each subtly different that we get a different impression each time? Or are we bringing our increasing knowledge (and constantly changing sympathies) about each character to our impressions of the repeating scenes? One reason this conceit works is because of the unifying theme of obsession - each character is so completely single-minded in their focus on one issue that they are blind to what else is happening even as they evolve to find catharsis. One is literally a heroin addict, but each has their psychological addiction (revenge, co-dependence, hypochondria, jealousy). The slow revelation technique also works because of the parallel theme of aging and acceptance of the consequences of their actions, as some can face how they have changed and some can't change. You need to see all three films to learn about each character's past and conclusion, as secondary characters in one film are thrust to the fore in another in explaining a key piece of motivation. The only place they really interchange is in an ironically, meaningless political debate at the public high school they each have some tie to.