Alain Resnais - Les herbes folles aka Wild Grass (2009)

Alain Resnais demonstrates he still has plenty to say in this drama based on a novel by Christian Gailly. Marguerite (Sabine Azéma) is a successful dentist with a busy practice and an offbeat hobby, flying small airplanes. One day, while shopping for shoes, Marguerite’s wallet is stolen, and it's found by Georges (André Dussollier), a seemingly happy man with a wife, Suzanne (Anne Consigny), and two children. As Georges looks through the wallet and examines the photos of Marguerite, he finds he's fascinated with her and her life, and soon his curiosity about her becomes an obsession. Georges' attempts to integrate himself into Marguerite's life begin to alarm her, and she contacts the police to keep him away, but Georges is determined that his new love for her will not be denied.





Not so much a fantasy as a fantasia, Alain Resnais’ first novel adaptation, his second adaptation (after Mélo) and, unless my memory fails me, his fifth film in CinemaScope (after Le chant du styrène, Last Year at Marienbad, L’amour à mort, and Private Fears in Public Places), this brittle comedy may also be the most purely surrealist of all his films, especially in its emphasis on irrational impulses (as well as its non-sequitur final shot). And the fact that it’s often creepy (as well as very personal) is surely more of a plus than a minus; it hasn’t been acknowledged nearly enough that Resnais’ best and most beautiful films — including Statues Also Die, Toute la mémoire du monde, Le chant du styrène, Night and Fog, Hiroshima mon amour, Marienbad, Muriel, Providence, Mon oncle d’Amérique, Mélo, and Not on the Lips, among others — usually turn out to be his creepiest. (An exception to this rule is L’amour à mort, which is exceptionally creepy but also far from Resnais’ best.)

This is a film whose pastel hues and intricate color coding (e.g., the multiple associations of blue with the hero, played by André Dussollier, and the various associations of red with at least two of the main women in the story, played by Sabine Azéma and Anne Consigny) may come even closer to comic-book images than those in I Want To Go Home. Wild Grass seems personal above all as an expression of Resnais’ (personal) shyness, although it doesn’t for me qualify as one of his masterpieces. It’s fascinating to ponder how his first two features as well as his last two to date focus on illicit passion, even though the blocking and frustration of that passion in the latter two films seems far more prominent (as it is in Muriel). What gives this odd provocation much of its thematic interest is the cheerful way the secondary characters (Dussollier’s wife, Azéma’s fellow dentist and best friend) become so warmly complicitous in not only tolerating but nurturing the mutual obsession between the two leads. (Jonathan Rosenbaum)







Las hierbas salvajes
Les herbes folles es la primera novela adaptada por Alain Resnais en su carrera. El guión, firmado por Laurent Herbiet y Alex Reval , está inspirado en la novela L' incident de Christian Gailly y describe el encuentro de una mujer, Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azéma), dentista y piloto a quien le roban su cartera, cuyo contenido es abandonado en un estacionamiento, y de un hombre solitario de pasado turbio, Georges Palet (André Dussollier) que la recoge. Entre estos dos personajes, que no tenían ninguna probabilidad de encontrarse, va a establecerse una relación sentimental llena de sobresaltos e imprevistos.







Une femme se fait voler son sac. Un homme trouve le portefeuille de cette femme dans un parking. Dans une histoire banale, l'homme irait porter le portefeuille au commissariat, qui alerterait la femme et chacun retournerait vaquer à ses occupations. C'est à peu près ce qui se passe au début de cette adaptation de L'Incident, un roman de Christian Gailly. Sauf que ce n'est pas une histoire banale, parce que l'homme est un aventurier de l'imaginaire et qu'Alain Resnais traque ce quelque chose d'étrange qui se cache dans la tête des gens, ces pulsions déraisonnables qui les font ressembler à des herbes folles, suffisamment vivaces pour s'infiltrer entre deux plaques de macadam...





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