
Everyone dies at the end of
Wild Grass, mercifully. But before the four protagonists’ private plane
takes a fatal nosedive, 87-year-old Alain Resnais’ latest has long since gone
down in flames, partaking in meta gestures and random flights of fancy with a
reckless abandon unjustified by its perplexing, off-putting tale. When 63-year-old
Georges (André Dussollier) finds the wallet of Marguerite (Sabine Azéma) in a
shopping mall parking lot, he becomes maniacally obsessed with the redheaded
stranger, convinced that he’s in love. She rebuffs Georges’ advances, but as
soon as her rejection proves successful, she falls madly for him, a bit of
flip-flopping romantic silliness that Resnais drenches in neon-halo lights and
great swathes of blue and red hues. The meaning of such illumination is
confounding, though no more so than his ill-defined characterizations (Georges
may be a killer, and Marguerite is a dentist as well as an avid pilot), free-form
(read: haphazard) plotting, and excessive aesthetic tomfoolery.
Wild Grass references movies and then
mirrors them, all while including the Twentieth Century Fox theme music twice, ending
the film on two separate occasions (once with a flashing FIN subtitle to boot),
and generally indulging in whatever arbitrary notions seem to have sprung to the
director’s mind. No doubt the
Last Year
at Marienbad auteur intends all of this deranged nonsense to serve as an
effervescent ode to the possibility of late-life love and the unfettered
creative cinematic spirit. There’s some bizarre vigor to a stunningly
out-of-left-field coda in which a heretofore-unseen girl tells her mom “When I
am a cat, will I be able to eat cat munchies?,” but otherwise, Resnais’ playfully
surreal stunts – carried out by repellent cartoon characters in a
faux-kaleidoscopic reality – never congeal into an emotionally coherent or
compelling whole.
The 47th New York Film Festival
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