Third Person
Haggis tells three stories, set in Paris, Rome, and New York, about different kinds of love, and his unifying theme is that a “third person”—a child, an old lover—lingers in the background of every serious relationship. He intercuts the stories, as he did in “Crash” (2004), but this time the characters don’t impinge on one another—at least, not until the end, when he changes our relation to everything we’ve seen. As we discover, four of the six have failed as parents, sometimes with disastrous results, but “Third Person” is hardly an accusation. Haggis shapes the stories as complicated adventures undertaken by damaged people whose unhappiness compels them to take risks. Much of the dialogue is prickly and intimate—so intimate that, at times, one has the impression that Haggis is unloading personal obsessions into his narratives, as Bergman and Fellini did.
All three tales are terse and volatile; as Haggis pushes toward the climax, he makes the sequences shorter and more urgent, with overlapping thematic and visual motifs, until commonplace reality gives way altogether, and the stories melt into one another. Haggis may be playing games, but the director of “Crash” and “In the Valley of Elah” doesn’t have it in him to be facetious. “Third Person” is serious or it is nothing. Literal-minded critics, angered by a few improbable plot turns and a metafictional twist at the end, will no doubt choose the latter. But “Third Person” is the kind of eccentric and emotionally exhausting movie whose ardent sincerity remains in memory after smoother, more conventional works have passed into oblivion.
Fabulous movie !
