Spun with all of the Alain Resnais' usual dexterity, Wild Grass enthrals Mike McCahill with its series of random events that keep changing the course of the lead characters' fate.
Wild Grass opens with an extended shoe-shopping sequence that suggests the veteran French director Alain Resnais has either been concealing a major foot fetish, or has become a late-life convert to Sex and the City: the first of multiple surprises here.
Emerging from the chicest Marc Jacobs boutique en tout Paris, red-headed aviatrix Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azema) has her bag snatched by a passing skateboarder. Rather than report the theft, she elects to let it go, inadvertently kick-starting the most haphazard plot of this, or any other, movie year.
Marguerite's purse ends up beneath the car of married oddball Georges Palet (Jacques Dussolier), whose first response is to wonder what to do with this artefact. When the two characters cross paths, they find they can't stop thinking about one another; and matters aren't helped by the fact their movements are being recounted by an entirely unreliable narrator (Edouard Baer), a modernist uncertainty principle of a kind in which the Resnais of yore revelled.
Spun with all of the director's usual dexterity, it's a divertissement made up of a thousand tiny divertissements, dramatizing a series of random events that keep changing the course of the lead characters' fate, right through to a confounding (yet perfectly apt) finale. We simply never know what shape Wild Grass is going to take until it's over: at times, it plays like an off-kilter romance; at others, particularly when Emmanuelle Devos's dentist comes to the fore, we could be watching a Marathon Man-style psychothriller.
This tonal variation would be as bewildering as anything in Last Year in Marienbad or Muriel, if Resnais didn't set such store in actors we're wholly prepared to follow from scene to scene. Dussolier synthesises funny-ha-ha and funny-strange with exceptional skill, while Azema’s Marguerite is a delightfully batty creation, determinedly guarding her independence from the chaos unfolding about her. So unpredictable is Wild Grass that it may be the first movie to take its cues from its heroine's hairstyle, but there the film is in a nutshell: daring, amusing, and - beyond a certain stage - quite gloriously out of control.
A wallet lost and found opens the door just a crack to romantic adventure for Georges and Marguerite in Alain Resnais's Wild Grass.
After examining the ID papers of its owner, it is not a simple matter for Georges to return the red wallet he found in to the police. Nor can Marguerite retrieve her wallet without being piqued with curiosity about who it was that found it. As they navigate the social protocols of giving and acknowledging thanks, turbulence enters their otherwise everyday lives.
"Self-indulgent doodling" -
Sidney Whitaker on 26th November 2010
If you wanted confirmation that this prettily coloured,
erratic and arbitrary string of sequences was mere indulgent film-making on the strength of Alain Resnais' ... more >
If you wanted confirmation that this prettily coloured,
erratic and arbitrary string of sequences was mere indulgent film-making on the strength of Alain Resnais' mythic standing in France, the irresponsible star, Sabine Azma, provides it in the interview that accompanies the film provides it.. On the practical side, an irresponsible dentist (when she feels like it), with a pilot's licence, who gives acquaintances a flight in her small place, proceeds to allow the crazy guy to perform aerobatics without fastening harnesses (they all die in the crash); on the cinematic side, all that concerns her is to bask in the romance of having Alain Resnais (still) directing her. < less
