Les Herbes folles (2009) - film review

Marguerite is out shopping when a thief suddenly snatches her handbag and hurries away.  Georges later finds the discarded handbag when he comes to collect his car in an underground car park.  Marguerite knows that she should report the theft to the police, but she can’t bring herself to do so.  Georges knows that he should hand the bag over to the police, but something prevents him from doing so.  Instead, Georges decides to trace the owner of the bag himself.  Naturally, Marguerite is none to happy when she realises she is being stalked by a stranger...

For more than half a century, director Alain Resnais has baffled and beguiled cinemagoers with his unique cinematic vision which combines the familiar with the frankly bizarre.  His latest film, Les Herbes folles (Wild Grass) is aptly titled.  This is a gloriously uninhibited walk on the wild side in which Resnais tacitly dispenses with the rules of filmmaking etiquette (not that they ever existed in the first place) and offers his most bewildering exploration of human experience, a chaotic fantasy that will make your head spin.  What Jean-Luc Godard did to the thriller genre with Pierrot le fou, Resnais does to the romantic drama with this film - i.e. rips it up and puts it back together again, as though he were a visitor from a distant galaxy (one with a strange sense of humour).  You can see why Resnais chose Mark Snow (of The X-Files fame) to compose the score.  This film is truly out of this world.

Les Herbes folles is loosely based on Christian Gailly’s 1996 novel L’Incident and is a love story in the way that Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a black comedy.  It would perhaps be more accurate to call it a parody of a love story, or, better still, a love story with a severe identity crisis.     The two protagonists - played by Resnais stalwarts Sabine Azéma and André Dussollier - are brought together by fate (in the guise of a stolen wallet-shaped MacGuffin) but are kept apart by their inability to act on their true desires.  Instead of doing the rational thing, the obvious thing, they go through an absurd cat-and-mouse ritual which soon takes us from rom-com into psycho-thriller territory.  We have by this stage learned that Dussollier is already married and has a dark secret, and so we naturally conclude that he is a psychopathic serial killer who makes a career of chasing after middle-aged women with red fizzy hair.   Things take an even more surreal turn when the hunted and the hunter do finally get it together and Azéma offers to take Dussollier up for a ride in her Spitfire (and that it is not a euphemism).  After that, it’s every man for himself.

As can be gleaned from this plot summary, there is more than a touch of the theatre of the absurd about this film.  The characters never do what we expect them to do.  The plot doesn’t seem to go where it should.  It is apparent that what Resnais is showing us is not real life (whatever that may be) but something more akin to a dream.  There are several things which support this interpretation: the inability of the two main protagonists to communicate, the suggestion of thwarted desire, the erratic way in which the characters look and behave, and, the real clincher, the utterly bizarre casting of Mathieu Amalric as a cop.

But what if this were more than a dream?  What if it were instead something from between the portals of reality and imagination - i.e reality as it is perceived, through the distorting prism of memory?  The smug voiceover narration could be the hero speaking to us as he attempts to order his muddled recollections into a coherent story.  The fraught relationship between memory and the real world is a recurring theme in Resnais’s work, and is particularly noticeable in his early films: Hiroshima mon amour (1959), L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) and Muriel (1963).  We are so sure that we know what we mean by reality, but Resnais’s films constantly remind us that we should not be so complacent.  Objective reality is something that no human being can ever see (and the last place you will find it is in an Alain Resnais film).

There is indeed a striking similarity between the luxuriant dreamscape of Marienbad and the stylised fantasy of Les Herbes folles.  Both appear to be attempts to fashion order out of chaos, and both employ the extreme subjective standpoint to great effect.  Is what the film presents an attempt to convey the workings of the creative mind (the writer or the filmmaker) as it conjures up a universe of the imagination, or is it something much darker, a visualisation of what may pass through a dying brain in the last moments of life?  It is tempting to think there may be a connection with Dennis Potter’s swansong TV play Cold Lazarus (1996), in which memories of life experiences are tapped from a revived cryogenically frozen brain.  Dennis Potter was after all the man who inspired Alain Resnais’s On connaît la chanson and his masterwork The Singing Detective. with its merging of present experience, memories and imagined fantasies, has a distinctly Resnais-esque feel to it.  How extraordinary that, in his 87th year, Alain Resnais still has the knack of making films that are both enchanting and fascinating, a feast for the eyes and a challege for the mind.

© James Travers 2010

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