Posted by Frank
If you think that trilogies are the exclusive domain of adaptations of young adult dystopian novels, think again. These four trilogies from Europe and Asia will satisfy your need for strong character development and in-depth storylines that span the length of three films.
The Apu Trilogy, from director Satyajit Ray, is considered one of the greatest achievements in Indian cinema. It starts in 1955 with Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) and we are introduced to Apu, an adolescent fighting to survive with his dreamer/poet father and struggling mother. In 1956’s Aparajito (The Unvanquished), Apu achieves success as a brilliant student, only to find it straining his relationship with his recently widowed mother. The trilogy concludes in 1959 with Apur Sansar (The World of Apu), which finds Apu reluctantly entering a marriage that abruptly ends when his wife dies during childbirth.
While the Apu Trilogy explores the hardships of life in rural India, a pair of trilogies from Northern Europe examines life in gritty urban Sweden. The Millennium Trilogy adapts Stieg Larsson’s wildly popular novels and begins in 2010 with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Män Som Hatar Kvinnor), where we meet Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a disgraced journalist who forms an unlikely partnership with Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), an anti-social computer hacker, to investigate a disappearance from decades before. If you’ve seen the very good American remake, you’ll find the Swedish version is even better. The subsequent films – The Girl Who Played with Fire (Flickan Som Lekte Med Elden) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (Luftslottet Som Sprängdes) focus on Lisbeth’s past.
Joel Kinnaman is best known to American audiences for his roles in The Killing and RoboCop, but it’s worth checking out the Easy Money trilogy. It starts with Easy Money (Snabba Cash), where Kinnaman plays JW, a business student who has a double life as a drug runner, whose life is inextricably tied to two other men – Jorge, a criminal on the run from the Serbian mafia, and Mrado, who’s on the hunt for Jorge. In Easy Money: Hard to Kill (Snabba Cash II) and Easy Money: Life Deluxe (Snabba Cash: Livet Deluxe), we learn of the consequences each of the men faced in their lives of drug smuggling and organized crime.
The Paradise Trilogy is the vision of acclaimed Austrian director Ulrich Seidl. Originally conceived as a single film with three parts, it became a trilogy with the relationship between the leads (and the uncomfortable encounters they have) as the only connections. In Paradise: Love (Liebe Paradise) we meet 50-year-old Teresa, who goes to Kenya as a sex tourist looking for love, but finds it’s business before pleasure for the boys on the beach. In Paradise: Faith (Glaube Paradise), we meet Teresa’s pious sister Anna Maria, whose goal of converting all Austrians to Catholicism is interrupted when her wheelchair-bound Muslim husband returns after years of absence. And in Paradise: Hope (Hoffnung Paradise), Teresa’s 13-year-old daughter Melanie falls in love with a doctor forty years her senior at a camp for overweight teenagers.
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