Film Review
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 light-hearted
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 natural
impulses. 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. After that, it's every man for
himself as far as unravelling what it all means.
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 experience. There are several things which support this
interpretation: the inability of the two main protagonists to
communicate, the recurrent theme of thwarted desire, the erratic way in
which the characters look and behave, and, the real clincher, the unlikely casting
of Mathieu Amalric as a nice Parisian cop (you'll never see that
combination of words again).
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 slightly irritating 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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Next Alain Resnais film:
Vous n'avez encore rien vu (2012)