Les herbes folles

Alain Resnais (2009)

Of course it’s great that Alain Resnais – half a century on from Hiroshima mon amour and now eighty-eight years old – is still making cinema but his latest work is consummately pointless, one of the most annoying new films I’ve seen in ages.   Or that I can recall seeing:  one consolation is that I probably won’t remember Wild Grass for long.  Whereas the impeccable straight face of L’année dernière à Marienbad and the reverential audience in whose company I saw it made me want to laugh, Resnais’s ‘playfulness’ here is increasingly enraging.   The other consolation was seeing it at Curzon Richmond as one of only five people in the theatre, all of whom stayed silent throughout.  Watching it with a houseful of appreciative chucklers – the movie is probably too civilised to generate anything as vulgar as laughter – doesn’t bear thinking about.

Wild Grass is adapted from a novel called L’incident by Christian Gailly, who worked on the screenplay with Alex Reval (aka Resnais) and Laurent Herbiet.   It’s about two people whose lives collide by chance.  As she’s leaving a swish Paris shoe shop with a new pair of red high heels, Marguerite Muir has her handbag stolen by a thief on roller-skates.  The thief takes cash from her wallet before abandoning it – still containing Marguerite’s credit and identity cards – in an underground car park.  It’s discovered there by a man called Georges Palet.   Marguerite, fiftyish and single, is a dentist with a passion for flying planes (she has a pilot’s licence).  Georges, who looks to be pushing sixty, is married with children and grandchildren but unemployed (his wife Suzanne must earn well to support their decent standard of living).  He’s also keen on aviation; as soon as we know this, we also know – it’s inevitable or predictable, depending on your point of view – that the climax of Wild Grass will be up in the air.  At the point of discovering the wallet, Georges is momentarily transfixed and repulsed by two young girls walking through the car park but warns himself not to act on his impulse to kill them:  he reminds himself that his feelings towards young women have got him into trouble in the past.  We never find out what the trouble was – beyond Suzanne’s remark, later in the picture, when her husband arrives at their house with Josepha, the partner in Marguerite’s dental practice, ‘I see you’re bringing them home now’.   Although he hands in the lost property to the police, Georges, without knowing anything more about Marguerite than the contents of her wallet reveal, becomes obsessed with becoming part of her life.  After she reports his borderline stalking and the police warn Georges off, it’s Marguerite who becomes fascinated with him.

The film’s opening shots – of what looks like the entrance to a mausoleum, then of grass growing in cracks – are fascinating; so too is the first main sequence when Marguerite is buying her shoes (we see a lot of her feet, then the back of her head of vivid auburn hair but not her face).  Wikipedia explains the film’s title (and quotes Resnais) as follows:

‘[Resnais’s] “wild grass” refers to a plant that grows in a place where it has no hope of developing: in a crack in a wall, or a ceiling. In the film his principal characters are “two people who have no reason to meet, no reason to love each other”. The image reflects the stubbornness of Georges and Marguerite “who are incapable of resisting the desire to carry out irrational acts, who display incredible vitality in what we can look on as a headlong rush into confusion”.’

This sounds promising – and exploring the unpredictable consequences of an apparently unremarkable event is a dependable dramatic hook – but it soon becomes clear that Wild Grass isn’t going to take its theme seriously.   There’s an unseen narrator, who hesitates and seems to change his mind about what’s happened and may be making the story up.   Both Georges and Marguerite have moments of imagining the way their interactions might take place or did take place; and the line between what might have been and what has been gets blurred.  I guess plenty of people will enjoy this device as a witty comment on the nature of fiction and cinematic narrative although it seemed to me a tired and worthless dilution of the story.    Because this is an ‘intelligent’ French film, it comes with cultural garnish:  a ‘meaningful’ quote from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education – ‘N’importe.  Nous nous serons bien aimés’ – fills the screen at one point.  Georges goes to see a 1954 American war film, directed by Mark Robson, called The Bridges at Toko-Ri; when he and Marguerite eventually meet at the place where she flies planes and embrace, ‘Fin’ flashes up and the 20^th Century Fox fanfare plays.   I took this as a mildly sarcastic comment on Hollywood’s propensity for false happy endings, although The Bridges at Toko-Ri doesn’t end happily and was released by Paramount (and why would the Fox fanfare play at the end of a film anyway?)

The definition of Marguerite as a dentist-aviatrix allows for some obvious, so-what descriptions of her work and life – like a montage of patients in the dentist’s chair exclaiming, ‘You’re hurting me!’  She’s played by Sabine Azéma – a dual César winner but an actress I’d not seen before.   I liked Azéma best before we saw her face, which has a bright-eyed, smile-playing-around-the-lips alertness that I can’t stand.  As Georges, André Dussollier (three acting Césars) is very skilled and makes you want to find out more about the character but Resnais’s approach is all the more frustrating when an actor is credible and engaging.  There are plenty of other good people in the cast – including Emmanuelle Devos (Josepha), Anne Consigny (Suzanne) and Nicolas Duvauchelle (as Georges’s son-in-law:  Duvauchelle doesn’t smile a lot but it’s still odd that directors think he’s naturally pugilistic – he was a wrestler in The Girl on the Train and he’s a boxer here).  Mathieu Amalric is remarkably unfunny as one of a pair of eccentric droll cops; Michel Vuillermoz is somewhat less unfunny as his partner.   Wild Grass, photographed by Eric Gautier and edited by Hervé de Luze, is incredibly smoothly made and Mark Snow has written a supple and initially intriguing score.    But the film is a waste of time.     The final line of the script has Josepha’s daughter asking the enigmatic question, ‘When I become a cat, will I be able to eat cat munchies?’   Perhaps that’s the beginning-of-another-story – here’s hoping it doesn’t materialise as Wild Grass II.

27 June 2010