"Trilogy" is fashionable nowadays. Perhaps it is to quibble, to question present cinematic definition, although argument could be advanced that mere chronology, sequential precedence or succession with the selfsame characters (albeit often different actors and directors), does not in and of itself constitute unity. Too many Roman numeraled or superscripted pre- or sequels, with or without subtitle tag to hook audiences, fail to re-stumble upon original inspiration, timing or blind luck. Might not true one-for-all, all-for-one, involve less the unreeling of clock-calendar time than, instead, an integration in simultaneous "real time," that is, concurrent acts and events considered from varying perspectives, so that each may be self-contained yet not fully complete without its mates?

A decade ago, "Three Colours" trilogy of Blue, White and Red laid out one of the most ambitious experiments with this impressionistic, fly's-eye technique, yet Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Liberty," "Equality," "Fraternity" looks at loss and love in contemporary Europe were uneven, and, moreover, even there each mosaic-tile component was not intrinsic to the others. Britain's two-part 1988 Little Dorrit: Nobody's Fault and Little Dorrit's Story gets repetitious, and Gus Van Sant's unsatisfying Elephant, too, comes to mind, with its re-doing of fifteen minutes' school corridor views.

Writer/director Lucas Belvaux' "The Trilogy" will open its three independent yet integrated parts, each running toward two hours, on three consecutive Fridays, and public reaction should be most interesting. On the Run/Cavale is a police- urban terrorist noir, An Amazing Couple/Un couple épatant a comedy romance, and After Life/Après la vie a personal melodrama. While each can be summarized, critiqued, there remains the improbable conundrum, to grasp each fully one must first see the whole, and vice versa.

Perhaps it is well to begin now, having last night screened number One, On the Run, with Two and Three in the wings for tonight and tomorrow. There were questions last night, afterwards, and though the plotline was comprehensible and the film not bad, one viewer who had already happened to see the middle and final features was handy and filled in some holes and clarified who was who and what the relationship was of who to who. But he quickly confused himself enough that he promised to return to re-view what he had viewed weeks ago.

Maybe, as the press kit puts it, only then will they all have "the effect of creating a fourth film that exists only in the viewer's mind." An admirable ambition.

Now for Part One, but with an admission. Hours have passed, and, Part Two under the old belt, fuller realization sinks in. Not just "admirable," but astounding, a case where the sum is for once actually greater than the workmanlike but unspectacular individual parts. This is not Kurosawa's retelling of an outrageous incident from four vantage points, nor is the technique Faulknerian, where truth becomes more defined each time it is circled. The former two artists are concerned with the interior, subjective, therefore elusive, nature of perceived reality.

Here in the current trilogy, on the other hand, though characters may be misled or mistaken for longer or shorter lapses, the camera does not conceal or distort even if focus is not so sharp as usual. Rather, it is as if the camera-as-eye were to follow several people, mostly coupled, who interact at work or socially or casually, and to concentrate in each instance on only one or two of these several. The three films cover, roughly, the political, love and social lives of these interminglers, each view satisfactory enough but not wholly understood alone and without other views and others' views.
For example, Cécile Costes (Ornella Muti), who is a major player in An Amazing Couple, barely appears in the first film, where one wonders who she is, where it is that she shows up, and why. But in Two, with its different focus-view, logical answers are supplied and it makes no difference that, in his scant minutes on-screen, sexy but sexless Bruno le Roux (Belvaux) is introduced as "Pierre." Deadly catalyst in On the Run, he merely intersects here, though his antsy companion Agnès Manise (Dominique Blanc) is important, and different, in both, for her connection with Bruno in One leads her to bring him to the mountain chalet in Two. In contrast, Alain (François Morel), the principal moving force and character, is vitally connected through wife Cécile but though spoken of in Bruno's story, does not appear there.

These separate slices are complicated but, alone, nothing extraordinary. The completed circle, however, is another story -- that "fourth film" in the mind's eye of the beholder --and one cannot but feel that here, for once, is a valiant experiment that has succeeded. "Fear, laughter and tears," all panels of the triptych need to be seen to appreciate each and also the whole altarpiece, and while it is much to ask -- tickets go for as much as $10.25 in New York -- do see the three of them, not just one or two.

A self-styled nocturnal noir, in grainy old-style color with no hand-helds, On the Run is violent but not bloody, more the school of classic gangster flicks than current gorefests. Sprung from prison by Jean-Jean (Hervé Livet), People's Army political radical Bruno trains back to a Grenoble apartment garage-hideout. Former underground accomplices dead, incarcerated or, shades of our Weathermen, married and middle-class, he still dreams of an uprising of the Masses -- but "there are no masses" -- and literally forces now married-with-child Jeanne (Catherine Frot) to help him. An unpredictable mix of cold brutality and forbearing generosity, he runs across Agnès, wife of depressed police detective Pascal (Gilbert Melki), and saves her from a beating by a punk dealer and then from a killer overdose. Further, he will make a trade with her, the drugs she needs in exchange for temporary sanctuary in her friend's chalet fifteen miles away.

But owner Cécile shows up. In a "bridge" explained in An Amazing Couple, she is deeply in love with her patent lawyer husband Alain and tracking what she fears is his tryst. In this complicated comedy of errors, the Gallic Jeff Goldblum-faced husband's hypochondria and resulting erratic behavior have led her to suspect an affaire. She hires her friend's husband Pascal to investigate extralegally, but, exasperated with morphine-addled Agnès, the seedy flic falls for his client, which in turn prompts Alain to suspect her of being unfaithful. Revising his taped last will and testament according to shifting circumstances, his trust in loyal assistant Claire (Valerie Mairesse) results in additional false impressions, as do the blanket randy overtures of Lothario surgeon friend Georges (Bernard Mazzinghi).

The amorous complications grow too great for the film to bear -- and are resolved in a cursory off-screen mutual breast-baring, as all such comedies can be -- and, as in all three of the films, much still needs to be edited out. There is, as a suggestion, way too much time spent in automobiles, on short narrow streets or windy country roads, so much so that characters' cars actually are identifiable tags: Alain's dark green Jag, his wife's orange Audi, the cop's white Renault, Bruno's VW Golf, even a taxi. Film time is needlessly spent getting places, and with stricter cutting the three separate-yet-intertwined features might eventually be trimmed to fit into one long but wieldy showing.

After Life is Part Three -- it is now the next night -- but the number designations are mine and really quite arbitrary, as any order seems as good as any other, for, again, the components are simultaneous, not chronologically sequential. Just as Bruno is the focus in One and Alain and Cécile in Two, here the hub is Pascal and Agnès, revolving around her binge drinking and twenty-year addiction and his ambiguity over his personal collusion in supplying her. Involved with Mafioso Jacquillat (Patrick Descamps), who leaves the dope thrice weekly at Freddy's (Yves Claessens) bar, Pascal must use his influence to help the gangster. The situation has reached critical mass, for the latter gave information for the revolutionaries' fatal 1982 bank robbery, is suspected of later ratting on them, and will blackmail and refuse to furnish more morphine until escaped Bruno is silenced. Desperate, Agnès rejects her husband and sets out to score heroin, until now taboo.

To Riccardo del Fra's violin-heavy original score, things build to crescendo, debts are collected, threads tied together, and guilt, death and life worked through. Once more, earlier scenes are fleshed out, clarified, from another point: Jeanne's pointless detention by the police, or the original betrayal of the revolutionary cell, or an apartment fire's aftermath. Three of the women are fellow teachers at Jean Moulin High School, but connections are multiple and hardly limited to the moment or the workplace.

Overlapping concentric ripples from distinct pebbles dropped into smooth water, "first" or "second" or "third" here makes no difference. Stood on its head or sideways, the total cumulative effect of "The Trilogy" would be the same. Indeed, by the time of whichever installment one happens to see last, there is a familiarity, and the viewer is already on the lookout to refer back or ahead to the first two. Not merely in the cinematography of Pierre Milon, but in its sensibility the unified work is European rather than American. Politics, drugs, loneliness, faith, cops 'n robbers, all are subsumed in a uniquely probing, at times contradictory, look at the essence of love and redemption. If one single view is not quite satisfactory, try another.

(Released by Magnolia Films; not rated by MPAA.)