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Once more with feeling

Film of the Month: [One] Cavale

The trilogy One, Two and Three follows interlinked characters and stories across a thriller, a comedy and a melodrama. Edward Lawrenson is intrigued

There's a scene midway through Lucas Belvaux's One (Cavale) that's set in a mountainside chalet. The movie is a fast-paced, sharply directed thriller, and this remote lodge seems typical of the genre. Overlooking the French city of Grenoble - in whose streets the rest of the film's quickfire action scenes take place - the chalet feels like somewhere to hatch criminal conspiracies, or to flee to when they go wrong. Sure enough, its main occupant is escaped convict Bruno Le Roux (Lucas Belvaux), who is biding his time here while the cops scour the streets below.

Yet there's a moment of incongruity among all this hardbitten stuff when the chalet's owner, an attractive middle-aged woman, appears. She's flustered at Bruno's presence and demands that he go, but she approaches him less like the murderous desperado we know him to be than as an unwelcome guest at a dinner party. In a movie whose steely surface frequently gives way to scenes of quick, merciless violence, the woman seems to have strolled in from another world, a character from an Eric Rohmer film adrift in a Tarantino movie.

The scene is repeated, more or less, in Belvaux's Two (Un Couple épatant), a comedy rich in Rohmer-like romantic misunderstandings. This time we see things from the point of view of the woman, schoolteacher Cécile (Ornella Muti), and the chalet, though outwardly unchanged, seems less like a conspirators' eyrie than the kind of semi-theatrical domestic space French bourgeois comedy has made its home. Oblivious to reports of political terrorist Bruno's escape from prison, Cécile has spent the last few days convinced that her husband Alain (Franois Morel) is keeping a secret from her. And Bruno, whom she thinks of simply as the man who is having an affair with her friend and colleague Agn s (Dominique Blanc), gets the sharp end of her tongue. Agns too is unaware of Bruno's crimes, but as a morphine addict in desperate need of a fix she has problems of her own. And her relationship with her detective husband Pascal (Gilbert Melki) - who is working on Bruno's case - is at the centre of the third Belvaux film to be released in the UK this year, the dark, unflinching study of chemical and emotional addiction Three (Apr s la vie).

Welcome to the formally dazzling, intricately interlinked worlds of La Trilogie, three separate films set in and around Grenoble during the same time period. Minor walk-on characters from one film occupy centre stage in the next, with selected scenes repeated, allowing seemingly throwaway moments to accrue a different significance on second viewing. There's nothing new to the idea of interlinked dramatic stories in the movies - the device is exploited in various ways in such recent examples as Amores perros, Pulp Fiction and Timecode - but La Trilogie extends the approach to encompass three discrete films, each with a running time of over 90 minutes. And the shift in perspective from one film to the next is further accompanied by a change in dramatic register.

While adhering, broadly speaking, to naturalist conventions, each of these movies is a distinct genre piece: One is a thriller, Two a comedy and Three a melodrama. Seen consecutively, the three build into a complex, rewarding assemblage, a daring experiment in narrative technique that is also an emotionally affecting, character-driven work of popular drama. Since the three films are best appreciated as connected parts of a coherent whole - which is why we're not devoting a separate review to each - it's impossible to discuss the project without jumping from film to film, chalking up cross-references that necessarily give away surprise plot points. Those who want to approach the trilogy fresh are advised to stop reading now and to return to this review on completing the cycle.

With its accomplished, albeit low-key action scenes, One is the most immediately grabbing of the three films, and you can understand why the UK distributors decided to open the cycle with it. (In French-speaking territories and on the festival circuit the films were released under stand-alone titles, suggesting they could be viewed individually and in any order.) Telling of Bruno's escape from jail and his struggle to elude his captors, One has a set-up that's simple to understand and features characters unencumbered with complicated psychological baggage. But this pared-down approach can make for an emotionally distant experience: because One depends for some of its dramatic impact on things we learn later in Two and Three, our first impression is of something half-completed, with figures whose backstories are riddled with unseemly gaps and whose relationships to one another feel underdeveloped.

This said, for long stretches, especially in the first hour, the sketchy nature of the narrative produces a sense of intrigue that's well suited to the thriller genre. Many of the details - Uzi machine guns rammed into leather attaché cases, brown envelopes stuffed with money - border on cliché, but Belvaux's deployment of these stock devices is carried off with such unironic assurance that the film remains compelling despite its emotional lacunae. A superb exercise in style - from Pierre Milon's effortlessly fluid camerawork to a wonderfully suspenseful night-time chase, all long shadows and ominous footsteps - One can be read as a metacommentary on how genre conventions hook us, even when we don't much care for or believe in the events or characters depicted. In the film's deadpan last moments Bruno disappears into a chasm beneath an icy Alpine snowfield, rubbed out, like an offending pencil mark on a page. The final image is a beautiful, blank surface.

But if this concluding scene suggests an attitude of godly disregard for the hero by his creator Belvaux - one that the audience is, to some extent, invited to share - this Olympian tendency is reversed in Two and Three. Characters whom we experience fleetingly as background action or comic relief in One are substantially fleshed out in the following two films.And as we're plunged deeper into the lives of those we'd previously dismissed as expedient plot functions, it seems likely Belvaux is making a moral point about our rush to judgement.

In One, for instance, Agns appears as the stereotypical street junkie of many a tough crime movie. It's only on seeing Three that you appreciate the desperation and fragility that underpin her addiction. In One her overdose is seen from Bruno's point of view - her sudden collapse viewed impassively from over his shoulder - and it's with reluctance that he stops to revive her. But in Three the same scene is unnervingly harrowing, the camera tight on Agn s' fitful gasps for breath as her body writhes on the floor. (Tellingly, there's a scene earlier in the film and in Two featuring a classroom debate about people's attitudes to drug addicts.)

The misleading nature of appearances is, one begins to appreciate, one of the subjects of the trilogy. Two, for instance, is almost an object-lesson on the messy consequences of jumping to the wrong conclusions. Thinking, mistakenly, that her husband is cheating on her, Cécile begins to keep tabs on him, setting off a chain of misinterpretations that's handled with elegant restraint by the director and actors, especially the lugubrious Franois Morel as Alain. The movie makes a joke of playing its characters' partial understanding of their situation against the audience's relative omniscience: our attitude towards the multiplying mishaps and recriminations is one of forgiving irony, and watching Alain and Cécile blindly caught up in the screwball logic of the finely calibrated plot is a deliciously sly pleasure.

But the joke is as much on the audience as on the hapless protagonists: throughout, the spectator is tricked into misreading key scenes and forming opinions he or she will revise on seeing subsequent instalments. Pascal, for instance, is made to look like a doe-eyed teenager in his relationship with Cécile, seeming to agree to keep her husband under surveillance because he's smitten with her glamour. It's only during Three that you realise that he suspects Alain of involvement with Bruno and that his dogged pursuit of the case is itself motivated by a need to get more morphine for Agn s.

Just as the characters see only what they want to see, so we tend to read each situation according to generic expectations. The propulsive pace of One doesn't encourage us to dwell on the protagonists' inner lives. The light, comedic tone of Two skates over the husband and wife's troubles and leaves us in no doubt that they'll be reconciled eventually. So the fact that Belvaux concludes his trilogy with the bleak Three is a melancholy statement. In so far as this is a definitive version of events - in which any loose ends or misapprehensions are cleared up - history is played out not as high farce but as grim tragedy.

But a question remains over whether one can fix a definitive reading of this cinematic puzzle. Ultimately, you sense that the detective work involved in piecing together the fractured narrative components is inexhaustible, and the ambiguities will only proliferate with repeat viewings. For the moment, though, the task facing the viewer is as likely to throw up firm conclusions as Harry Caul's surveillance work in Coppola's The Conversation. And about the only thing we can be sure of is the truth of Pascal's loaded line to Cecile: "Things are rarely how they appear."