A woman, dentist and amateur pilot Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azéma), has her purse stolen, her wallet lost. A man with a mysterious past, the enigmatic and sheltered Georges Palet (André Dussollier), finds the red wallet, returning it in hopes he’ll be able to converse, maybe even fly, with the owner.

The street is alive with light in Wild Grass © Sony Pictures Classics

The author of the novel L'Incident, Christian Gailly, on which legendary French director Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad, Private Fears in Public Places) latest effort Wild Grass (Les Herbes Folles) is based upon has an interesting quote at the start of the film’s production notes. “During my single, casual conversation with Alain,” he starts, “we shared our liberties: ‘Do whatever you want with this book, I told him, and, in return, let me work in peace.’ I was writing another novel. I have only seen the film once, and what I remember is this: Monsieur Resnais does not film literature, he composes images that talk to us about something else entirely, about what I don’t know, but it is visible and, in my opinion, that is what the cinema should be.”

That is pretty much all one needs to know before choosing to buy a ticket for this motion picture. Does it make sense? Not usually. Is it easy to understand exactly what it is that Resnais is going for, possible to decipher the differing themes behind his images? Sometimes, but not often. This is the iconoclastic director working at his most threadbare and obtuse, and as beautifully composed, constructed, designed and shot his latest is none of that makes it any easier to ascertain exactly what it is he’s trying to say.

And it is beautiful. Working in a primary color pallet filled with baby blues, vibrant yellows, fluorescent greens and devastating reds this is a sharp, visually stimulating feast that continually gives viewers something interesting to look at and dissect. Every image is an artistic gem, and like a great expressionistic painter Resnais leaves nothing on the table as his vivid imagination runs gloriously wild.

But the film is also hugely frustrating, a dramatically gonzo effort that breaks all the rules of narrative storytelling and does so in almost increasingly infuriating ways. If Pauline Kael famously hated Last Year at Marienbad I can only imagine the vitriol she’d throw this film’s way, and for those that thought the love story between X and A was indecipherable just wait until they get a load of the dramatics going on between Marguerite and Georges.

Can a film be both fascinating and bewildering? Can it aggravate while at the same time it mesmerizes? And do the eventual secrets to unlocking the world’s most cryptic and complicated questions lie in the nonsensical statements of children fresh off a mid-afternoon nap, their innocence a doorway to understanding?

If Wild Grass is the example than the answer to all of the above is a confidently hesitant yes, and like two dead men getting up to fight and pulling out their swords to shoot one another this is one saga of exaggerations and opposites hard to turn away from. Like the best of cinema it is a picture impossible to fully appreciate let alone talk about with only a single viewing (which I’m sure this not really a review, review illustrates). Like the worst, it can become fascinated with its own idiosyncrasies to the point it feels nauseatingly pretentious.  

Is saying any of this a recommendation? I can’t tell myself and I’m the one writing this darn thing. All I know is that there is a woman, there is a man, they may be in love and at a certain point cat munchies come into play. Whether or not that’s enough to get you into a theatre to find out how those things fit together is, like the film itself, a mystery.

Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4) 

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