TRAILER: DVD Release: Wild Grass

Film: Wild Grass

REVIEW: DVD Release: Wild Grass

Film: Wild Grass
Release date: 8th November 2010
Certificate: 12
Running time: 105 mins
Director: Alain Resnais
Starring: Sabine Azéma, André Dussollier, Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric
Genre: Drama/Romance
Studio: New Wave
Format: DVD
Country: France/Italy

As Alain Resnais ages so do his regular cast members. Here, Sabine Azéma and Andre Dussollier reprise their familiar roles in the most recent of the octogenarian filmmaker’s offbeat romances. Based on Christian Gailly's novel L'Incident, the film focuses on the aftermath of a seemingly innocuous incident.

While shopping in Paris, Marguerite Muir (Azéma) has her handbag snatched by a rollerblading mugger. Georges Palet (Dussollier) subsequently finds her discarded purse and develops an inexplicably intense interest in her photographic ID and pilot’s licence. This leads to a series of one-sided phone calls and letters – straightforward but motiveless stalking, to all intents and purposes.

George’s intentions are never fully (or even partially explained), and there is something disconcertingly sinister about his obsession with the frizzy haired Marguerite – not least when he slashes her car tyres. Perhaps even more difficult to understand is why Marguerite suddenly becomes interested in her pursuer...


It’s an oddity of a film, even by Resnais’ opaque standards. The voiceover which narrates proceedings is lifted directly from the novel upon which the movie is based and is faithful to the original text, yet it reveals very little and poses more questions than it answers.

The character of Georges is deliberately mysterious – hardly an original concept – yet he is so enigmatic as to be frustrating. Occasional glimpses of murderous intent and his suspicion of those in uniform and their reciprocal distaste for him hint at a criminal past. But equally he could just be a bored fantasist with a runaway imagination. Refusing to divulge this information gives the film an ambiguity which makes it difficult to invest much in its central character – a flaw which could have been remedied if Marguerite was fleshed out more fully.

The stalked female lead is played with familiar skittishness by Azéma in a style well-known to those who’ve seen her previous performances in Resnais’ films. Sadly, the sketchy characterisation and baffling interest in her middle-aged pursuer make it difficult to warm to her. Even her kookily frizzy red hair seems like an affectation too far.

Despite the character flaws, it’s a stylish piece of work. The whimsical opening as Marguerite shops for shoes is wonderfully shot, with her face never revealed (just that hair!) even as she sees her handbag waving in the wind as it is snatched. It’s a stunning camera shot – a justifiable use of slow-motion and vividly contrasting colours.

Indeed, the film is full of colour, from Marguerite’s neon-lit apartment and gaudy yellow car to George’s lush green grass. The sets are as lavish as the characters are sparse and often shot in pastel-hued soft focus – even the turquoise desk at police HQ disappears into the fuzzy distance as Marguerite inquires after her pursuer.

Georges’ lawn is not the only grass which features in the film. Opening with tufts of greenery pointing through a cracked footpath, the action is interspersed with images of wild grass throughout. It’s difficult to say which of these represents Georges most accurately – does his well tended garden hint at the order he craves whilst being tempted to the wilder side of the untamed wild grass? Or has he arrived at order in his home life having eschewed the ‘wild’ side. Again, the movie’s ambiguity prevents an easy answer being reached.

If anything the film becomes less linear as it reaches its conclusion. Scenes which are presumably hypothetical are played out in the imaginations of the characters – these scenes within scenes occur in ‘thought bubbles’ which recall Resnais’ earlier film I Want To Go Home. A confusingly edited scene between Georges and two policemen descends into incomprehensibility as lines are repeated, and unusual cuts and zooms are employed to destroy any sense of conversation or convention.

The ending of the film is unsatisfying, but predictably so. After posing so many unanswered questions during the course of Wild Grass there was no way Resnais would cap it off with a conventional climax.


Wild Grass is lovely to look at but difficult to love. Resnais can be infuriatingly flippant, and here his stylistic quirks and tricks are not strong enough to carry the interest of the viewer from start to finish. A film requires characters and/or a plot strong enough to sustain the audience’s interest. Here, Resnais provides neither, and, as such, the film is a triumph of style over substance. RW

REVIEW: Cinema Release: Wild Grass

Film: Wild Grass
Release date: 18th June 2010
Certificate: PG
Running time: 105 mins
Director: Alain Resnais
Starring: Sabine Azéma, André Dussollier, Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric
Genre: Drama
Studio: New Wave
Format: Cinema
Country: France/Italy

When two paths cross, lives entwine in a collision of unlikely, unexpected and fantastic new relationships. New Wave veteran Alain Resnais reveals an internal world of fanciful fairytale rationalised by reality in his adaptation of Christian Gailly’s L’incident.

Opening in a chic Parisian shopping centre, the viewer is introduced to Marguerite Muir (Azéma) - that is, introduced to her flaming bush of scarlet frizz, for she remains faceless for over six minutes as cinematographer Eric Gautier places the viewer in the midst of the city with voyeuristic shots. Content with her latest splurge, the camera follows Muir as she leaves her favourite shoe shop, but her joy is short lived when her bag is snatched by a petty thief.

This is when Georges Palet (played by Resnais regular Dussollier) enters the film. He stumbles upon her discarded wallet and sets the entire film in motion. Thanks to Muir’s pilot’s licence, Palet finds himself equipped with her phone number and address, and spends days contemplating whether to spice up his middle-class life by making contact with the stranger.

As he debates his course of action, the viewer is left to ponder his true colours and underlying motive - Palet’s voice over candidly admits to intentions that are less than savoury, creating something of an ongoing theme that is never fully explained, explored or even justified. Eventually the amateur detective leaves his mission to the professionals, and hands his discovery in to the police.

On retrieving her purse from the police station, Muir asks after its rescuer, and obtains Palet’s phone number. She politely calls him to thank him for his efforts, unwittingly provoking his fixation. The awkward conversation that proceeds sets the tone for the next chunk of the film, whereby Palet’s pursuit increases in intensity, resulting in him visiting her home, leaving letters in her post box and even slashing her tyres. In one of the film’s rare pinches of logic, Muir seeks advice from the law - but refrains from pressing charges. However, Palet’s attention is gradually igniting a spark of interest within her, and the stalker is in danger of becoming the stalked…


Resnais complains that the majority of filmmakers claim that their calling lies in revealing reality through film, adding that his sentiments therefore sway towards contradicting that trend. This may account for his obscure deviations from the main story, which is left as a frayed piece of rope with no tie to bring the loose ends together. For example, as Palet and Muir’s remote relationship draws them ever closer, Resnais and Gailly happily fulfil the inevitable prospect of having the characters meet in person. During the build up to this guiltily satisfying scene, the viewer is invited into their private lives; friends and family are introduced to the audience and each other - mingling across the Muir-Palet border.

On the other hand, the voiceovers that divulge the characters’ thoughts, although rather surreal and invalid in the context of the plot, indicate exactly what Resnais intends to avoid - reality; that is, real characters with real thoughts. Who hasn’t mulled over sinister fantasies when aggravated? That doesn’t make anyone a murderer, yet in the cinematic world, audiences have been conditioned to expect an extensive back-story to justify such an event. Resnais has escaped this anticipation, where he readily conforms in other scenes. These telling voiceovers make you unsure of the characters with Palet, in particular, having hints of schizophrenic tendencies - on occasion, the viewer is left to wonder whether he can actually distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Wild Grass is a stylised film, with Gautier’s presence shaping the entire film. Where voiceovers fail to convey the exact speculations of characters, hypothetical scenes are played out onscreen as thought bubbles laid over shots of the ‘real’ world. To add to that air of ambiguous uncertainty, they are often lived out several times, edited and then replayed, in an effective visual representation of a universal, if subconscious, mental process. Gautier’s eye for composition is often flaunted, with perfectly poised shots that see characters framed in such a way as to reinforce the voyeuristic values that penetrate the film. Use of colour is striking, at no point more so than when Muir drives through the nocturnal roads of Paris, her face reflecting the flickering neon lights that drench the deserted streets.

Wild Grass is a simple film made to appear much more complex than it really is. The peculiar characters, with their enigmatic backgrounds and sometimes surprising relationships, help dress the piece in robes of depth, but Resnais’s recent bias towards the light-hearted side of film is nonetheless prominent in his most recent effort. For all its eccentricity, the story is thin and flimsy, characters are somewhat frustrating and difficult to empathise with, and the plot digressions are meaningless.

Bizarrely, the climactic scene between the two protagonists, which is another trap that manages to surprise precisely because of its predictability, is not the climax of the film.


As aesthetically pleasing as Wild Grass may be, Resnais’s priorities seem to lie simply in contradicting, bluffing and double-bluffing audience anticipation. Rather than making a film of substance that tells a story, confusion seems to be Resnais’ sole motivation. RS