Alain Resnais’ “Wild Grass” was the opening night selection for this year’s New York Film Festival last week. We saw it earlier that day. And yet we’re still grappling with our feelings about the film. Overall, the movie is a triumph, as weird and wily and wonderful as “Last Year at Marienbad,” if not as gorgeous and cutting-edge.
The movie (based on a novel by Christian Gailly – yes, this marks Resnais’ first literary adaptation) concerns the relationship between a man named George Palet (the always-great André Dussolier), who has done something very questionable in his past (but, this being Resnais, that “something” is never quite illuminated) and dentist Marguerite Muir (played by Resnais’ wife, Sabine Azéma). Their bizarre relationship develops after her purse is snatched in the opening sequence (included: a beautiful shot in which the snatched purse is gliding through the air) and Palet finds her wallet near his car in a mall parking lot. He’s caught off guard by the wallet. He’s having homicidal fantasies about the smutty teenage girls he sees. (Again: his psychosis is never explained.)
Their relationship develops in a truly unusual way, and the film is punctuated by moments of heartbreaking beauty, not only in the cinematography (it begins with an expansive of open grass and a whoosh into a stone structure) but in its subtle and clever editing work, like a single-shot sequence, which pans around a living room, that shows the passage of time as a night of dinner and reverie persist. In a weird way, it’s reminiscent of the “changing of the seasons” sequence from “Notting Hill,” except much more intimate, both geographically and emotionally, and it was accomplished without the aid of sophisticated computer generated trickery.
The movie is a hard thing to nail down, with wildly fluctuating tones that somehow manage to gel into a whole by the time the movie reaches its bewildering, but utterly perfect, climax.
Resnais, who was on hand for the post-screening press conference and displayed a keen knack for pop culture sensibilities, said he hired composer Mark Frost in part because he was such a fan of the work Frost did for Chris Carter’s television series “The X-Files” and “Millennium.” (Resnais also said that he loved “The Wire.”) Throughout “Wild Grass,” you get the feeling that it’s Resnais flipping the channels – one moment it’s a family drama; the other a police procedure (complete with a floppy-haired cop played by the irrepressible Mathieu Amalric); a broad, slapsticky comedy; and the next a weird stalker thriller.
In fact, after the movie Resnais said that the end of the movie is something that you can choose yourself, with multiple possible outcomes, like a “choose your own adventure” story, or, well, flipping the channels to something that better fits your sensibilities [ed. note, part of the reason I walked out during Cannes, I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t hate what I had seen, but was getting a headache and decided to bail].
The styles cohere thanks to Resnais’ gorgeous technical skill, the unified excellence of his cast (many of whom are Resnais mainstays) and his general fuck-you attitude. “Wild Grass,” with its deliberate opaqueness, will be many things to many people, but it’s hard to deny the mastery of its craft, and the power of its filmmaking. [A] — Drew Taylor
