PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 2/5/04)


That nasty spider from The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King may have weaved some intricate webs, but none quite as labyrinthine as the mechanics of writer-director Lucas Belvaux's ambitious three-film cycle, dubbed simply The Trilogy. Much like Peter Jackson, Belvaux shot all three films at once, yet more like Kieslowski's Three Colors triptych, their interconnectedness doesn't demand to be seen in any particular order; the films are deeply wedged in different genres (noir-thriller, romantic comedy, and melodrama, chronologically), boast the same cast of characters (with major players from one film showing up as supporting roles in another), and take place at about the same "universal time" à la Rashomon. If that weren't impressive enough, the parallel narratives are ambiguously fractured so that each may only be pieced together by viewing the others in the series, creating what Belvaux ostentatiously calls "a fourth, virtual film that no one will have seen but that everyone will remember." If Harvey Weinstein had come up with that marketing campaign, he'd probably try to charge filmgoers four separate admissions.

The first installment, On the Run, opens and sets its nimbly suspenseful pace with the impetuous, Jean-Pierre Melville-inspired prison break of Bruno (played stone-faced by Belvaux himself), an obsessive left-wing radical oblivious to his own antiquity; the revolution came and went in the midst of his 15-year incarceration. Armed like Rambo (or should I say Rambeaux?) and never short on disguises, Bruno cunningly evades roadblocks and the trappings of surly, corrupt cop Pascal (Gilbert Melki), while aiming to reassemble his former anarchist crew in Grenoble. Tracking down his ex-lover-compatriot Jeanne (Catherine Frot), who has started life over as a schoolteacher, wife, and mother, Bruno finds that she wants no part in his Weather Underground-style terrorism and vengeance, but fearfully agrees to help as he grows more desperate and unstable. Bruno later befriends and takes shelter with Pascal's wife, Agnès (Dominique Blanc), a strung-out dope fiend unable to find her own fix after being cut off by her husband. Did Bruno track Agnès down purposefully or is it a fascinating synchronicity? Who exactly is the fat man conspiring with Pascal and why does Bruno wants to kill him? How does Belvaux get us to empathize with his psychopath? Many as-yet-unknowns should be revealed in the next two films, An Amazing Couple and After the Life, but for now, there is plenty to absorb within Bruno's avenge-and-vanish story line. As our antihero briskly runs, with bullets whizzing overhead, toward the film's open-ended mountaintop conclusion (which oddly plays like the darkly comic analogue to Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A.), there is a notable satisfaction in knowing that unlike The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, or Star Wars, the subsequent films in this series will be released only a week apart.

For such a meticulously carved puzzle that all but announces it has missing pieces, On the Run mostly succeeds as both an exercise and a stand-alone entertainment. Based purely on its concept, the whole will probably end up reading much stronger than its parts (an idea I was continually conscious of while watching this episode), but that isn't to condescend to what On the Run has going for it: solid acting, taut editing, smartly economical dialogue, an elevatingly reverberant score, and a rousing vitality that left me salivating for The Trilogy in full.

—Aaron Hillis

On the Run makes its run from January 30th through February 26th at New York City's Angelika Film Center.