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?