Night. A dark road outside a prison. A man is clambering over the perimeter fence. Gunfire tears through the air from guards stationed on the rooftops. The driver of a car that's just pulled up returns fire. The escaped prisoner clambers into the passenger seat and they roar off into the night, tyres screeching as gunfire erupts all around them.
The opening of Lucas Belvaux's Trilogy - One is a taut, dialogue-free 30-odd minutes that's like some modern day cross between Jean-Pierre Melville's existential gangster flicks and the observational nitty-gritty of The Day Of The Jackal.
"GRIPPING THRILLER"
Following escaped proletariat revolutionary Bruno Le Roux (Belvaux) as he returns to his hometown in preparation for one last terrorist operation before escaping across the border, this is a gripping thriller. It's so sparse, it feels as though it's been pared down to the bone marrow.
Yet this superb movie is only the first instalment in writer-director Belvaux's genre-bending trilogy that aims to interlink three genre movies (a thriller, a comedy, a melodrama) in order to deconstruct the conventions of each.
As the lead characters in one film become supporting, secondary characters in the next, Belvaux wants us to appreciate the codes that govern the limits of cinematic storytelling. His aim is to make us aware of the ways in which it is always genre that dictates the tone of a scene, making it thrilling, funny, or sad, depending on the context.
None of that will mean much on watching the gritty realism of Bruno's one-man guerrilla war against capitalist oppression. Yet, as the trilogy continues, the pieces of this fractured jigsaw puzzle begin to fall into place with delicious precision.
"ENTHRALLING JOURNEY"
One of the cinematic events of the year, Belvaux's bold experiment promises to be an enthralling journey into the very heart of film storytelling itself.
In French with English subtitles.
Trilogy - One (2003)
