Arabian Nights and five more alternative trilogies
Superhero movies don't have the monopoly on trilogies, as Arabian Nights, Miguel Gomes's three-part take on the One Thousand and One Nights tales attests. Here are five other great movie trilogies sans spandex and space travel.
With franchises and shared universes becoming the staple diet of major studios over the past decade, the word trilogy has become synonymous with big budget spectaculars and science fiction masterworks. However, Miguel Gomes’s Arabian Nights, which is playing this month at Glasgow Film Festival, has prompted us to look past the space opera of Star Wars, the gravity-defying Matrix, or Marty and Doc’s trio of sojourns through time. Trilogies are also prevalent in arthouse and indie cinema – sometimes forming a larger narrative like their multiplex cousins (see Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher films), and on other occasions utilising some other method to connect three potentially disparate works together (like Lars von Trier’s E-Trilogy). Inspired by Gomes’s films, here are five other examples of great alternative film trilogies.
Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s much revered triptych nominally takes as its inspiration the French Republican values of liberté, égalité, and fraternité, although according to the director, these thematic concerns were more to secure funding than for artistic reasons. Rather, Kieslowski placed three mesmerising actresses against the tricolour flag (Blue: Juliette Binoche, White: Julie Delpy, Red: Irene Jacob) and crafted a ranging and beguiling interlocking trilogy about the modern European ideal. The use of the requisite colours is breathtaking, while chilling grief and cunning coincidence bookend unexpected comedy.
Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy
When the credits rolled at the end of Richard Linklater’s enchanting 1995 romance Before Sunrise, few would have imagined it as the first part of a trilogy. However, after a teasingly ambiguous conclusion, Céline (Julie Delpy, again) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) lived on in the minds of audiences and, it would transpire, their creators. Nine years later the two would meet again in Before Sunset and once more in 2013's fantastic Before Midnight (The Skinny's favourite film of that year). Their naturalism makes their journey across nearly 20years together as painful, uncomfortable and heartwarming as observing the undulating fortunes of dear friends.
Park Chan Wook’s Vengeance trilogy
The very name of director Park Chan Wook’s trio of films describes the hue of their connective tissue. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance are narratively independent but all are consumed with a burning desire to get even. Park was a prime mover and shaker in what has become known as the South Korean New Wave (beginning in the late 90s) and these three films are characterised by their marriage of the extreme genre elements that were hugely popular at the time with Park's undeniable flair for composition and style. Oldboy’s bravura single-take fight scene became a highpoint of the movement.
Andrzej Wajda’s Solidarity Trilogy
Not the most well-known trilogy on this list, but one of the more impressive. As an act of political discourse and – according to many – a catalyst for social change in Poland, it is also arguably the trilogy here with the most far-reaching importance. Andrzej Wajda's Solidarity trilogy begins in 1977 with the visual chutzpah and formal dynamism of Man of Marble exploring the iconography of Communism's past. Four years later, union action prompted a sequel, Man of Iron. 30 more years passed before, in 2013, Wajda concluded the sequence with the rebellious energy of Walesa: Man of Hope – the real life story of Lech Wałęsa, who inspired the previous two films.
Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy
Last, but by no means least, is Satyajit Ray's lyrical Apu trilogy. Drawing on lessons learned from the visual poetry of great Soviet filmmakers like Eisenstein, Ray set about crafting a biographical tale of beauty and grandeur over the course of just under a decade. From having never directed a single scene before embarking on 1950's Pather Panchali, he went on to follow it with 1956's Aparajito and concluded with 1959's The World of Apu, which critic Robin Wood famously described as "one of the cinema's classic affirmative depictions of marriage." He went on to make many wonderful works, but the Apu trilogy remains his most celebrated.
Arabian Nights screens in Glasgow Film Festival: Vol 1: 22/23 Feb, GFT, 6.15pm/12.50pm | Vol 2: 24/25 Feb, GFT, 5.45pm/1pm | Vol 3: 25/26 Feb, GFT, 5.50pm/1.15pm
Read more about Glasgow Film Festival in The CineSkinny – in print at Glasgow Film Festival venues and online at theskinny.co.uk/film/cineskinny
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