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
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