La Trilogie 2: An Amazing Couple Movie Review:


This is the rom-com episode in Belvaux's trilogy, but being a French film, it's not terribly romantic or comic really. It's more of a farcical examination of paranoia and assumptions centring on a couple that seems almost desperate to find something wrong with their solid marriage. Alain (Morel) is a hypochondriac who's finally convinced his doctor (Mazzinghi) to do exploratory surgery. But he's keeping this a secret from his wife Cecile (Muti), who thinks he must be having an affair. So she asks her friend's (Blanc) cop husband (Melki) to keep an eye on Alain. But of course now Alain starts wondering why Cecile is secretly meeting a strange man. Soon all their friends and colleagues are caught up in the spy-vs-spy chaos.

Everything about this film tries so hard to be frantic and zany that it basically leaves the viewer in the dust. It's almost impossible to keep up with the throng of characters coming and going--friends, family members, strangers--most of whom have little to do with the main storyline. These distractions make it virtually impossible to care about the story, while the way Alain and Cecile jump to one wrong conclusion after another makes us lose patience with them. The performances are solid, if a bit wide-eyed and goofy, but nicely conveying the increasingly frenzied desperation. And it's good fun to see this story intersecting with other people and events in the trilogy. Still, Belvaux really needed to establish the central characters before launching into the overcomplicated bedlam. If you can keep track of who's who (it was touch and go for me), there are some wonderfully funny sequences here and there. But without any sense of meaning or heart, these isolated scenes and people never add up to much.

Rich Cline

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