Potentially the swansong of French New Wave visionary Alain Resnais "Wild Grass" is a wild journey into the intuitive cinema cookbook, where various ingredients are hurled in seemingly random proportions. Sometimes the resultant pastry is delicious, other times barely edible. Throwing around his movie aficionado weight Resnais delivers a piece verging on farcical, pretentious, but ultimately with enough self-awareness to avoid ridicule.
A tale of two zany (but unforgivably underdeveloped) protagonists, who through a random mundane crossing of paths become almost neurotically obsessed with each other. 50 year old Georges (Andrei Dussollier), a tired man with a dark past (never revealed throughout the movie and the slight suggestions as to the nature of his mishaps just muddle the story) finds a stolen wallet belonging to 40-something Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azema), a fuzzy redhead dentist. Within it he gets infatuated with her picture in a pilot's license, which suggest certain frivolous freedom and a fulfilment of childhood fantasies. After returning the wallet (via the police) Georges starts compulsively stalking the woman, sending her letters, phoning her and in sheer anger slashing her tyres. Inexorably once Marguerite cuts this off by informing the police, she in turn becomes unstrung and overpowered by a drive to get to know the would-be stalker. Flung in the midst of all this is Georges wife, Marguerite's co-worker and a well-meaning police-officer. All leading to a misogynistic wet dream with a suitably cinephile double ending Fin.
All of the above placed within the confines of a Amelia-like narrator, who attempts to push forward the action and expand the context, but ultimately tires and dissuades attention. Characters themselves lack any foothold in real life, seemingly more like a conjecture imposed onto a movie reel (with grown-ups acting like crazed love-stricken teenagers on permanent entactogenic drives. Actions and reactions are borderline asinine (this includes everyone) detached from normalcy, not helped by the dissoluted plot, which forgoes attempts to build up character motivations. The motive of obsession seems to be the theme, but when a woman falls madly in love with a stalker, another female gets all gooey and blissful from being sexually assaulted, while his wife understandingly accepts all this unmistakeably points to pseudo-artistic masturbation of Lars von Trier proportion...
Adding to this Resnais' comedic jabs and nods the movie feels like extrapolated absurdity posing as serious nouvelle cinema. This movie actually ends in the la-la-land of blue skies and romantic endings, juxtaposed with Georges being unable to close his fly (zipper) after taking a pee-pee. Much too my frustration the viewer has to sit out through two appearances of the word FIN, before they actually fly off into the blue yonder...
Some of the experimentation during various shots was also pretty irritating, felt misplaced and added a further layer of ridicule.
A tale of two zany (but unforgivably underdeveloped) protagonists, who through a random mundane crossing of paths become almost neurotically obsessed with each other. 50 year old Georges (Andrei Dussollier), a tired man with a dark past (never revealed throughout the movie and the slight suggestions as to the nature of his mishaps just muddle the story) finds a stolen wallet belonging to 40-something Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azema), a fuzzy redhead dentist. Within it he gets infatuated with her picture in a pilot's license, which suggest certain frivolous freedom and a fulfilment of childhood fantasies. After returning the wallet (via the police) Georges starts compulsively stalking the woman, sending her letters, phoning her and in sheer anger slashing her tyres. Inexorably once Marguerite cuts this off by informing the police, she in turn becomes unstrung and overpowered by a drive to get to know the would-be stalker. Flung in the midst of all this is Georges wife, Marguerite's co-worker and a well-meaning police-officer. All leading to a misogynistic wet dream with a suitably cinephile double ending Fin.
All of the above placed within the confines of a Amelia-like narrator, who attempts to push forward the action and expand the context, but ultimately tires and dissuades attention. Characters themselves lack any foothold in real life, seemingly more like a conjecture imposed onto a movie reel (with grown-ups acting like crazed love-stricken teenagers on permanent entactogenic drives. Actions and reactions are borderline asinine (this includes everyone) detached from normalcy, not helped by the dissoluted plot, which forgoes attempts to build up character motivations. The motive of obsession seems to be the theme, but when a woman falls madly in love with a stalker, another female gets all gooey and blissful from being sexually assaulted, while his wife understandingly accepts all this unmistakeably points to pseudo-artistic masturbation of Lars von Trier proportion...
Adding to this Resnais' comedic jabs and nods the movie feels like extrapolated absurdity posing as serious nouvelle cinema. This movie actually ends in the la-la-land of blue skies and romantic endings, juxtaposed with Georges being unable to close his fly (zipper) after taking a pee-pee. Much too my frustration the viewer has to sit out through two appearances of the word FIN, before they actually fly off into the blue yonder...
Some of the experimentation during various shots was also pretty irritating, felt misplaced and added a further layer of ridicule.