WILD GRASS (Dir. Alain Resnais, 2009)
A frizzy red haired woman (Sabine Azéma), who we mainly see from behind, has her purse snatched just after leaving a shop at the beginning of this French (comic?) drama. The narrator (Édouard Baer) explains that although it is an natural impulse she doesn’t call out after the thief.
Later an eccentric middle aged man (André Dussollier) finds one of the contents of the purse - a wallet – in the parking lot of a mall. After seeing Azéma’s picture the man starts to become infatuated with her.
After some deliberation Dussollier turns in the wallet to the police - Mathieu Amalric (“Quantum Of Solace”) is the attending officer – but that doesn’t stop him from phoning and writing letters to Azéma, much to her displeasure.
Anne Consigny, as Dussollier’s wife, appears to know what’s going on, yet is fascinated. When her husband finally stops the correspondence, Azéma misses the attention almost immediately. She speaks with Consigny on the phone and finds out that Dussollier is at the cinema so she goes there to wait for him to exit the theater.
After this I would be hard pressed to describe the remainder of the plot. The first two thirds are absorbing as they explore the character’s boundaries albeit in an abstract manner, but the final act is a mess of artsy imagery and an aviation diversion that finds Azéma and Dussollier in a small plane flying as far away from audience comprehension as they can get.
Every so often there are shots of weeds growing in the cracks of the street or a sidewalk and I suspect that we’re supposed to connect this to the title. It’s some symbolic comment on the characters finding love where it wasn’t originally supposed to exist, but I’m just guessing here.
WILD GRASS (French title: “Les Herbes Folles”) is a baffling bizarre mind numbing movie that loses its hold and fizzles out in a stupefying display of pretension.
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