Alain Resnais directed his first film in 1936. His 49th, "Wild Grass," opens here today, and at the age of 88, he still shows his command of the medium, the sort of cinematic command that dramatically marked a pair of classics, "Hiroshima, Mon Amour," (1959) and "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961). He also shows his delight in moving back and forth from reality to unreality, from acting to dreaming.
"Wild Grass," from a novel, "L'Incident," by Christian Gailly, deals with a 70-ish Parisian, Georges Palet (Andre Dussollier), who meets a younger woman and gets into a relationship that reeks of the unworldly and peculiar and which indicates that the title of the book has a lot more meaning than that of the movie. Georges meets Marguerite (Sabine Azema) after the woman with dazzlingly frizzy red hair has a purse seized from her hand by a bike-riding thief. Georges finds her wallet–with credit cards but without cash–alongside his car in a garage where someone tossed it. Her wallet includes not only a driver's license but a pilot's license
He takes it to a police station, where the discussion with a young policeman (Mathieu Amalric) has Woody Allen or Bob Newhart overtones as they talk in side-by-side, rarely meeting sentences.
Marguerite is a dentist who owns a World War II English fighter plane, a Spitfire, that seems to solve many of her problems and create many others. It's just another odd piece in a story where Resnais takes pleasure in inserting odd pieces here and there. Anyway, Georges pursues Marguerite so avidly that she goes to the police, who are the same bumbling amateurs to whom he took the wallet in the first place.
They convince him to stop stalking, at which point the story flips upside down and she begins pursuing him.
Georges' wife, Suzanne (Anne Consigny), doesn't understand her husband, or maybe she understands him far too well, but she's willing to answer the phone at 1 a.m. and talk to a strange woman about him.
Resnais obviously loves the strange things one can do with a movie, and he seems to delight in tossing clues here and there about what is going on. Some of the clues are real and others are false, of course. Some of the movie is charming and delightful, other parts are confusing and even tedious, but Eric Gautier's impressive cinematography keeps it all bright and colorful.
Opens today at the Plaza Frontenac
–Joe