The story starts off simply enough: a woman’s purse is stolen and later, a man finds her wallet, and wants to return it. Through this relatively ordinary series of events, Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azema) and Georges Palet (Andre Dursollier) turbulently enter each other’s lives.
Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, legendary director Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass furthers the filmmaker’s path on the road to discovering the motivations and complexities behind inter-gender relationships.
Like his (only living) contemporary peer Jean Luc Godard, Resnais began his illustrious career in the 1950s with groundbreaking originators in the genre of French New Wave cinema, such as Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad. He continued throughout his career to seek, in his unique fashion, why men and women act in the fashion they do towards each other.
In Wild Grass, Georges and Marguerite meet seemingly by chance. If they had met earlier in their middle-aged lives, they may have enjoyed a fulfilling existence together. As it is, Georges is married with children, and Marguerite is satisfied being a single, successful dentist. Once Georges discovers the wallet, both participants attempt to enter the other’s life at various points, but each time the results prove awkward and surprisingly hostile. Clearly these two at the very least anger one another, yet for unexplained reasons cannot cut their newly initiated ties.
After over 60 years making movies, Resnais has a confident understanding of persuasive filmic techniques. Employing distinctness in the characters’ point-of-view, Resnais uses a heavy amount of internal monologue in conjunction with voice-over narration. Generally, these tools tend to be a distraction for the viewer, but Resnais commits fully the stylistic choice and it proves to be effective in conveying the commotion within the characters’ minds. In addition, cinematographer Eric Gautier’s lush and inquisitive swooping shots allow these deliberate explorations to supplement the inner workings of Georges and Marguerite’s mind’s eyes.
Wild Grass, per French existentialist film standards, contemplates the roles we play in this strange, humorous and frustrating life of ours. Though not a film for all audiences, Wild Grass will indeed speak to those seeking meaning behind our established human connections…and those we’d like to have. B+
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Ari Silber is a Loyola MBA student. Before graduate school, he worked for nine years in the Los Angeles film industry, focusing on marketing, publicity and distribution.
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