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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The Belgian director Lucas Belvaux has made three new films, which
will open, during the coming month, at a rate of one per week. The first is called "On the Run," the second, "An Amazing Couple," and the third, "After Life." Belvaux would prefer each film to stand alone, but these works were raised together, like triplets, and they should be confronted en masse. If you had told Shakespeare that the first and third parts of "Henry VI" totally rocked but that you couldn't be bothered with the second, he would have fingered the fluff below his bottom lip and called you a very whoreson dog. And quite right, too.
The movies were shot, over a period of twenty-two weeks, in Grenoble, and anybody who knows the place will appreciate what a useful arena it makes. The city sits--nicely cupped or loftily frowned upon, according to taste--in a range of mountains, and the air there feels not just clean but bright, like the backdrop for a toothpaste commercial. From the start, Belvaux makes it plain that he has sniffed something sinister beneath the shine. Here's the deal: these three films do not tell successive stories. In fact, they offer pretty much the same bundle of story, untangled in different ways. Sometimes a scene will be repeated from film to film, with minor adjustments; at other times, it will merely be implied, but we will, for the first time, learn of its aftermath. Each movie covers a...
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