Wild Grass (Les herbes folles) (2009)
Directed by Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais has never considered himself to be an auteur. Faithful to an ancient belief, popular during the thirties in Hollywood cinema, that considered the scriptwriter the auteur of a film, he always paid a great deal of attention to the sources of his films. This is why his films are sometimes a strange mixture between the virtues of the original script, or book, or sometimes even play, and his cinematic vision, resulting in something closer to the stream of consciousness than to a linear plot. Hence, Resnais’ films are equally showing his contribution and that of a Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Semprún or, for his latest film, Wild Grass, that of Christian Gailly, the author of the novel The Incident, upon which the films is based. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t something uniquely distinctive for Resnais, something that made him earn the label of “auteur” from the critics of Cahiers du cinéma and was imitated by the highly influential John Boorman film, Point Blank. Half a century after the critical success of his first two feature films, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, by far his masterpieces, Resnais seems stilistically closer to his first efforts that ever with his Wild Grass, combining his experimental (the Cahiers du cinéma critics would just say “modern”) style with the surreal plot of Gailly’s novel.
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Meanwhile, Resnais has become more likely associated with comedy than with the kind of bizarre drama he was directing at the beginning of the sixties (not to speak of the documentary, a genre that he has virtually abandoned since the end of the fifties); nevertheless, those who admire his oeuvre like to re-discover from time to time the same Resnais from
Hiroshima Mon Amour in his subsequent films. Overall, he is seen as a precise director, with an eye for intricacy and ambiguity, a director whose films sometimes need several views in order to be evaluated. This is how Roger Ebert is describing his Resnais experience in a moving text from 1999 (
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll), and that must be the reason why
Wild Grass has been highly praised last year at Cannes by Ebert himself and by Andrew Sarris, for example, this year. On the other hand,
Cahiers du cinéma declared
Wild Grass the best film of 2009, a poll of the US film critics eventually also declaring it the best film of 2009 unreleased in the US. After so much praise, it’s obvious that
Wild Grass is one of 2009’s most important films. Or is it? Obviously, it’s not a bad one: the direction and the cinematography are among its highlights, but
Wild Grass also includes a bunch of tricks that are suitable for the sixties, or what we remember to be the sixties, but look different nowadays. First of all, it has two endings, one of them being a pastiche of the melodramatic genre, with the two main characters reunited in the end and kissing – but, in an age in which no serious films ends like that anymore, who is Resnais really addressing? Then, the film is interrupted somewhere after its first half by a quote from Flaubert’s
Sentimental Education, as an improbable motto. Two or three times in the film, the word “cinema” is associated with the 20th Century Fox fanfare. It’s easy to see all these elements in a pastiche of the French New Wave film, but surely not in a serious film made by a veteran filmmaker linked mainly to the sixties, like Resnais is.
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When it comes to developing the plot of his film, Resnais starts in a way that should remind us of Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, following the footsteps of the heroine, a redhead dentist (Sabine Azéma), who’s about to buy a new pair of shoes. The whole ritual is filmed in detail, without revealing the face of the character, in a manner much similar to the opening sequence of Resnais’ 1963 film, Muriel, or the Time of a Return, only without the accelerated editing. When the male character (André Dussollier) enters the stage, he is also performing one of its rituals, changing the battery of his cheap watch, but the way the camera moves and the reaction of two cops as the male character passes by makes you think for a second that this might be a thriller, after all. Instead, Wild Grass is at best a farce: as a man finds a wallet and starts to be curious about the owner, whose picture he finds inside, he gradually develops an obsession for her, starting to write innumerable letters to her address and eventually following her. Almost like the third character, the narrator of the film has the mission to ironically translate the mundane facts into an absurd love story; his remarks mainly translate the thoughts of the characters, but also humorously interfere with the plot, as the anonymous voice seems not to remember the name of a certain street or indulges in commentaries about different types of planes to be used for a looping. Hence, the whole structure follows Resnais’ initial intentions, i.e., to evoke the ironical tone of the novel onscreen; the narrator’s interventions and the moves of the camera both try to add details to the story, to amplify it, to connect unusual facts, except for the very last sequence, when they’re supposed to do exactly the opposite, as the narrator’s voice fades away and the camera rapidly moves from the scene of the expected epilogue. The problem is that none of the characters constantly harassed by the irony of the narrator are likeable, and you just can’t empathize with any of them. At best, they’re defined since the very beginning by their passions, at worst, all they do is to follow, presumably blindfolded, their instincts, in a plot that doesn’t add much sense to it. It might just be the novel that makes the whole plot too ambiguous or too flat, but Wild Grass surely has its measure of useless characters (at least a bunch of them, in the final episode, at the hangars) and inexplicable ones (the main character’s wife seems just to exist and not to really play a part in the story). That’s why Wild Grass still proves the existence of a veteran director and a distinguished craftsman of the images, but it also happens to be the kind of film that, no matter how many times you see it, you never figure what it was about or, most important, what the director meant by it.
