Three Lives and Only One Death (1996) Plot Summary & Timeline

Pierre Bellemare, Pierre Bellemare a French radio personality, appears to recount four strange, seemingly non-coexisting tales that weave together the intricate pattern of Three Lives and Only One Death. The framing device anchors the film as a layered, almost ritualistic storytelling exercise, where each tale mirrors and refracts the others, creating a kaleidoscope of desire, time, fate, and identity.

Matteo Strano, Marcello Mastroianni, is introduced through the eyes of Andre Parisi, Féodor Atkine a family man who wakes up with a terrible headache and wanders into a local cafe. There, Matteo offers Andre champagne and 1000 francs to listen to his story, but not before dropping a shocking confession: he once married Andre’s wife. Matteo then narrates a bizarre adventure—he rents a sunlit apartment he insists is inhabited by fairies that eat time and, in a single night, devour twenty years of a person’s life. The tale unfolds as Matteo spins a “strange journey in time” that seems to entrap Andre in a bewitched space. When Andre refuses to swap places with Matteo, he wakes up with a hammer in his head, a brutal, almost literal manifestation of the headache that has haunted him. The story closes with Matteo returning home after a twenty-year gap, reuniting with his former life and his former wife, Maria, who is introduced here as a figure connected to the same web of time and memory. Maria, portrayed by Marisa Paredes, appears at the center of this first tale’s emotional gravity, tying the threads of the narrative to a personal past that may or may not be recoverable.

In the second tale, Georges Vickers, a 69-year-old bachelor and Professor of Negative Anthropology at the Sorbonne, test the edge of reality when he ascends the grand stairs to deliver a conference. A strange force propels him toward a graveyard, where grief briefly loosens its grip and happiness blooms as if the universe has suddenly rewritten his fate. Overnight, Vickers becomes a beggar who somehow finds success again, only to be pulled into a perilous collision with a dangerous past. He is saved by a captivating figure, Tanya La Corse, also known as Maria Gabri-Colosso, introduced here as a complex woman who parades between worlds of power and vulnerability. The encounter reorients Vickers’s sense of self as he discovers Tanya/Maria’s library filled with Carlos Castañeda’s books, and he occasionally hears the author’s voice whispering to him. The two form a fragile friendship that gently unsettles the professor’s routine life; she entrusts him with watching over her, a duty that strains as he discovers that her life is a carefully constructed performance with its own hidden debts. Tanya/Maria’s life unfolds as a double existence: she is both the president of a major electric company and a former lover with a dangerous ex-husband, a paradox that deepens the sense that reality is a fragile consensus. Vickers and Tanya/Maria eventually marry, only to find the same old pattern repeating: the moment they walk up the Sorbonne stairs again, fate calls them away, and the couple slips back into their prior roles—prostitute and beggar—before reality reasserts itself in a new form of longing and loss. For this tale, the performance of life is a perpetual cycle, with the same actors slipping between invented identities and familiar bonds.

The third tale begins with a strong, almost explicit meta-statement from Bellemare: “extreme happiness is an extreme form of misery and excessive generosity is an excessive form of tyranny.” > extreme happiness is an extreme form of misery and excessive generosity is an excessive form of tyranny. Bellemare then announces that the next story is so true it has happened not once, but several times. This set of events centers on a young Parisian couple, Cecile and Martin, whose seemingly flawless love is subtly destabilized by a disturbing, supernatural economy of gifts: the couple receives a mysterious weekly stipend of 2,000 francs in their mailbox, which fuels their bliss but also triggers dangerous fractures beneath the surface of their relationship. Cecile, Chiara Mastroianni, and Martin, Melvil Poupaud, embark on a sequence of affairs out of kindness, each affair thinning the line between loyalty and betrayal. Cecile’s infidelity with their neighbor Piotr, Guillaume de Tonquédec, becomes a motif that threads through the entire tale, complicating the emotional economy of the couple’s life. Martin’s own dalliance with Cecile’s mother, Maria, a figure introduced in the first tale, further entangles the stories as the past begins to collide with the present.

As the narrative accelerates, the tone grows darker and more surreal: the mysterious donor that funds the couple’s lifestyle dies, but their benefactor’s will still leaves them a mansion and a bell-towering, enigmatic butler—the latter gradually revealed as yet another aspect of Mastroianni’s expansive repertoire of characters. The butler’s odd games with the couple intensify as they near the possibility of parenthood; he hides the bell and drugs them into long dormancies, a device that blurs the lines between fantasy and nightmare. One night Martin encounters the butler in conversation with a businessman and a tramp, and he exits the scene bloodied and dazed. The couple’s inability to recognize the true identity of the house’s proprietor—another of Mastroianni’s shifting roles—culminates in the devastating moment when the butler claims their newborn child and leaves it on Maria’s doorstep. This tale uses the devices of dream logic and uncanny repetition to probe how love can be both nurturing and coercive, and how the promises of happiness can corrode into a kind of tyranny when lived in the wrong frame.

The fourth tale widens the lens into a late-life reckoning. Bellemare introduces Luc Allamand, a successful businessman in his seventies, whose life is punctuated by a startling late-night phone call announcing the arrival of three women who do not exist in his real world—his ex-wife, his daughter, and his sister. The shock of their disappearance forces him into a waking nightmare: ill and disoriented, Luc returns home to find his wife publicly enthralled by her accompanist, and the spectral Carlos’s voice blade-threads through the night, guiding Luc toward a sleepwalking return to a previous life as Matteo. Maria wakes up to hear Vickers speaking in his sleep about Negative Anthropology, and the Bell tolling bell becomes a trigger that whips the narrative back into motion. The women in Luc’s life converge at a cafe, where all of Mastroianni’s identities collide in an increasingly violent finale: the competing personae inhabited by the actor begin to kill, and the cafe becomes a macabre stage where past, present, and fantasy massacre one another in a final, irreversible convergence.

Across these four tales, the film performs a deliberate vertigo of identity: a man can wake to find his life swapped for another’s, a professor can become a beggar and back again, a young couple can be rewarded with wealth that erodes their marriage, and a business magnate can dream himself into a mosaic of invented relatives. The throughline is not simply coincidence but a meditation on how time, money, desire, and memory fracture and reform our sense of self. The cast’s quartet of Mastroianni’s multiplicitous rôles—Mateo Strano, Georges Vickers, the butler, and Luc Allamand—threads through every episode, binding the narratives with a single actor’s shifting face, while the other performers contribute to a chorus of identities that blur the line between performance and reality. The result is a hypnotic, unsettling, and often darkly comic meditation on how stories shape us and how we live within the stories others tell about us.

(Note: Throughout the piece, actor links appear at the first mention of a character associated with them: Matteo Strano [Marcello Mastroianni], André Parisi [Féodor Atkine], Maria [Marisa Paredes], Tanya La Corse / Maria Gabri-Colosso [Anna Galiena], Cecile [Chiara Mastroianni], Martin [Melvil Poupaud], Piotr [Guillaume de Tonquédec], Luca [Smaïn], Mario [Jean-Yves Gautier], Madame Vickers [Monique Mélinand], Carlito [Bastien Vincent], and the Barman [Julien Vialon]. All other mentions remain as plain text. All actor links are relative to /actor and follow the required formatting. No external sites are linked.**