Out of Frame: Wild Grass
The latest cinematic puzzle-box from French director Alain Resnais shows the director -- now, at 87, rather staggeringly in his 7th decade of making movies -- still more than capable of creating films that are, at once, thought-provoking, engaging and thoroughly befuddling. Wild Grass is the first literary adaptation in that long career, taken from the novel L'Incident by Christian Gailly. Resnais seems intent on keeping the story's literary underpinnings intact, and does so through the constant use of narrations, both from a third person narrator and internal monologues from the characters themselves.
As a device, it should distance these characters from us, but the fact is that, as is often the case with Resnais, these people live in such a skewed and obviously constructed reality that the florid voiceovers seem entirely naturalistic. For a time, the movie itself seems rather straightforward and reality-bound; the "incident" in the title of the book is the snatching of a purse from Marguerite (Sabine Azéma), an eccentric, fire-maned dentist with a Sex and the City-level shoe addiction and a love of aviation. Georges (André Dussollier), a middle-aged retiree, finds the discarded wallet, and after failing to reach her by phone, turns it in to the police.
The film seems to want to go down the track of a romantic-obsession thriller, as Georges, who seems otherwise normal and happily married with grown children, grows increasingly fixated on Marguerite. There is an undefined violent past for Georges, talked about only in his narrations, that may or may not simply be in his imagination. Is he a retired gangster? Or just entirely unhinged?
Marguerite tries to politely put him off, before bringing in the police to mediate. Slowly, the film loses all rooting in either genre or reality. Mathieu Almaric provides an amusing turn as the officer, particularly in a purely comic scene where the police warn Georges that further contact with Marguerite would be unwise. This comedy serves in part to bridge the early portions of the film, which are played relatively straight, into the absurd and surreal territory that follows.
Things develop after this in utterly unpredictable ways, mostly because these characters seem to operate in a world made more of dreams than of reality, though the film is never that literal about such delineations. Resnais structures it as a kind of downward spiral, with each successive event, whether it's Georges' wife's reaction to her husband's odd behavior, or the unprompted involvement of Marguerite's dental practice partner Josepha, growing steadily more and more strange.
Wild Grass is eventually populated by characters that are more made up of their subliminal urges, attractions and barely repressed (and often unexplainable) compulsions than of any kind of normal traits. The final sequence is completely Freudian in its implications and unsubtle imagery, before Resnais really takes us down to the bottom of this rabbit hole, displaying a series of images (including one rather amusing shout-out to his own surreal classic, Last Year at Marienbad) which leads eventually to a finale that modern audiences might see as a Lynchian head-scratcher -- though it's important to note that Lynch's bag of tricks is hugely influenced by Resnais' work to begin with.
Resnais is as restlessly, impishly experimental as ever. Yet he still maintains enough of a footing in recognizable themes and traditional cinema that his work retains a basic accessibility, even when it strays into the overtly avant-garde. Such is the case with Wild Grass, a work that is as confusing as it is rewarding and entertaining.
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Wild Grass
Directed by Alain Resnais
Written by Alex Reval and Laurent Herbiet, based on a novel by Christian Gailly
Starring André Dussollier, Sabine Azéma, and Mathieu Amalric
Running time: 104 minutes
Rated PG for some thematic material, language and brief smoking.
Opens today at E Street.
View the trailer.