Directed By: Alain Resnais
Written By: Alex Reval, Laurent Herbiet
Cinematography By: Eric Gautier
Starring: Sabine Azéma as Maguerite Muir, André Dussolier as Georges Palet, Anne Cosigny as Suzanne, Emmanuel Devos as Josépha
So Wild Grass is the first movie I’ve watched in a week, and for all its unevenness and directorial missteps, it is a poignant reminder of what I love most about arthouse cinema and film in general. Perhaps because I have exhausted myself of my articulacy in my previous post, a regrettable, indulgent exercise in verbosity, I’m finding this review particularly hard to write, so I’ll start with the easy part: the cinematography. When watching Wild Grass, it’s fiercely impossible to not notice how beautifully filmed it is; there is, in all honesty, not a single scene that isn’t gorgeous and awe-inspiring and brimming with depth. Launching into geek mode…
The film takes every opportunity to celebrate the beauty of lighting; Gautier uses soft lenses and digitally alters the lights with feathering techniques and various enhancement effects to make them have a dream-like haziness, and the effect is calming and gorgeous. Just look at how the red backlights are glowing and surrealistically expansive. Even the arbitrary spotlight in the background transcends its tangibility and becomes a disembodied, enigmatic, watchful eye. The red almost portends danger about to intrude uninvited into the warm, yellow confines of Georges' house. Even in the dark, the various shades of turquoise and green and brown and yellow on the house are clearly visible.
Here, the dream-like haziness of the lighting we witnessed in the previous still becomes an all-embracing, expansive sea that immerses and caresses the entire frame. In most arthouse films that make use of coloured, neon lighting (Tom Twyker's Run Lola Run, Cam Archer's Wild Tigers I Have Known, Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats etc., the lighting is often harsh and abrasive. Here, the lighting is no less striking, but it is soft and gorgeous rather than excessively lurid and gawdy. It's a refreshing change, bestows an immediate stylistic recognizability and ties in too wonderfully with the disjointed surrealism of the narrative.
But the beauty of lighting is not all Resnais wants to extol; colour, as observed in the previous two shots as well, is an important visual element here, not only stylistically but thematically. The film, in its entirety, is a celebration of life in all its unpredictability and elasticity, and in this scene, Resnais passionately and sensuously captures the beauty of an obligatory house chore. It's arbitrary placement within the narrative is itself important because it is one of many instances where Resnais eschews plot linearity for a gloriously indulgent celebration of the quotidian.
Here, Resnais drenches the tired 'family dinner' scene with warm, fuzzy, homely orange lighting, painting a portrait of utopian idealism. Yet, it is in this scene that Georges has a rendezvous (of sorts) with his mistress (of sorts) Marguerite, and that Georges' son insults his father's surname. The irony is quite self-evident, and lighting is cardinal in the bestowal of this added dimension. The bigger implication is of how the world at large (represented by the half-witted policemen) falsely perceives Georges to be living a perfect life. He has a lasting, functional marriage, money, a big-ass house, grandchildren, a seemingly wholesome family, yet his life is so wrought with loneliness and ennui that he turns to an imaginary lover to satisfy his need for something different, something immediately meaningful.
But Resnais is too youthful, too romantic and too ironic to lament life's pains without too simultaneously, self-knowingly, celebrating its mundane minutiae. Even an unclean lawn mower with grass residue scattered hastily across its prodigious body has an ethereal, mesmerizing beauty. Scenes like this and the extreme close-up of paint being slathered against concrete suggest the endless beauty of life -- if only we are wise enough to open our eyes to it.
Again, this is a celebration of the little things, except this time it is (characteristically) more strange than pretty. When Georges walks to a police station, the hyperactive camera stealthily tracks his movements from his car until he steps through the police station door, at which point the camera bizarrely lingers instead on a trash can outside it. This is mostly just Resnais having fun; he knows that we expect him to follow through with the tracking shot, and purposely subverts our expectations, because, as with all of his films, he fluidly and unexpectedly interrupts conventional scenes with unexpected twists and plot progressions and transitions.
In fact, the first 30 minutes or so of the film is solely dedicated to disturbing and undermining cinematic tradition, a testament to the endlessness of human ingenuity and creativity. The narration is gloriously self-aware, continuously tempting us with slices of unoriginality but then immediately overturning our expectations with brilliant turns of phrase and often outright strange plot progressions. This part of the film, in its very deliberate, self-knowing eschewal of all predictability, is endlessly surprising, fiercely inventive, and specially catered for those who (like me) obnoxiously attempt to anticipate dialogue and plot. Also, I really love how the narration here is refreshingly unassuming and styled as a real-time stream of consciousness; it’s almost child-like in its gentle, sensual laboriousness. Arthouse films so often tend to be esoteric and philosophical, and perennially revolve around the bigger questions of existentialism and love and humanity, and because Resnais tackles something far more tangible and far more pertinent — beauty — Wild Grass at once becomes startlingly relevant and refreshing.
Again, unlike most art films, this film actually really, really fun moments. The scene where Josépha calls Maguerite out of concern for her health and Maguerite responds in a droning, deadpan monotone while the camera hypnotically documents the movements of a rocking chair is particularly wonderful. The scene where the camera focuses judgmentally on Josépha’s slutty boots. The scene where Georges dramatically reaches out to Maguerite in a pseudo-illicit embrace and the 21st Century Fox theme music emphatically swells in the foreground as the camera rapidly zooms in. The scene where Georges dramatically reinvents the encounter between Marguerite and her neighbour as a campy film noir. The scene where a farmer with extensive knowledge of aeroplanes ponders the legality of performing aircraft aerobatics in a civilian flight zone. The scene where Maguerite is dramatically recreated as the stock protagonist of an evil dentist horror show.
But this is not a particularly good movie; at least not by Resnais’ standards. To all those unfamiliar with Alain Resnais, he is one of greatest, most revered (I hold him in higher regard than his more widely acclaimed contemporary Jean-Luc Godard) directors in French cinema, and was instrumental in the establishment of the French New Wave in the 1960s (he was fucking 88 years old when he made Wild Grass, a testament to his youthfulness, vibrancy and endless ingenuity). He, along with Godard and some other obscure French directors, essentially pioneered the notion of the Auteur, one who makes a film as an author with stylistic and thematic conventions and not as a faceless storyteller. Before David Lynch took the arthouse scene by storm with his debut film Eraserhead, Resnais was the face of surrealist cinema. Resnais is the original weirdo of film. And as such, this movie, while it does have some wonderful moments, is not nearly in the league of Resnais’ best work. But even when compared to other brilliant arthouse films (Mullholland Drive, The Future even) this doesn’t really hold its own. For example, it’s not made particularly clear why Maguerite calls Georges after spending half the film chasing him away (and successfully managing to do so, with the help of some painfully stupid police officers). It’s a very nonsensical, improbable turn of events, and not the good kind either. One assumes that Georges and Suzanne are still married solely for the preservation of habit, but this isn’t really explained either; Resnais would much rather indulge himself in searching cracks in the road for random grass patches than do something necessary like that.
In true spirit of arthouse cinema, which, in its conformity to convention is inherently surprising and perhaps even uninspired — although in all fairness Resnais probably does it for the irony — the narrative in Wild Grass is interjected sporadically by numerous visual motifs (the flying handbag, the wild grass, the traffic lights, the neon-drenched roadtrips), except unlike the best art films they don’t really add much to the film except more aesthetic beauty. There scenes where Georges is seen walking backwards in a dream-like state into a cinema as a circular frame closes in on him the traffic sequences are also quite aimless. The celebration of neon lighting in the wordless driving scenes start out being wonderful and inspired, but then Resnais opts to drag them on for the longest time, and to insistently stuff as many of these as he can into the film. Again, he probably does it for the kicks, but the audience is not invited for the ride, and it just comes across as tiresome and boring.
There are a few moments where the film abruptly becomes supremely hard to follow, becomes seemingly nonsensical, but at least these moments are bursting with inventiveness and are endearing in their passionate refusal to be constrained by the modalities of logic and convention. In fact, I would have liked this film a lot more if it were a lot more whimsical and a lot more experimental with the plot progression. Resnais works best when he is being self-indulgent and optimally weird, because his eccentricities are what make his films such joyous, masturbatory romps. But, alas, too often the movie meanders aimlessly, too slow to enjoy and too repetitive to really get into it. When his characters are swept up in their ridiculous imagination or their tension-filled encounters, the movie finds its niche, but these sequences are too few and too far between, and it takes a lot of speed and whimsicality to sustain a film predicated on unpredictability. When the film does work though, it has a certain exuberance of spirit, an inimitable passion for cinema, and that, above all, is really what makes this film wonderful. Ultimately, I’m really glad that I got back into movies with Wild Grass, because more than any movie I’ve watched recently, it’s a celebration of arthouse impenetrability, of arbitrariness and creativity and possibility, and that’s a really, really special thing.
The ending sequence has a random farmer’s daughter, who we see for the first time there, ask the question “Mommy, when I’m a cat, will I be able to eat cat munchies?” It’s gloriously random, indulgently nonsensical, passionately weird. If only the entire film were executed with such speed and idiosyncrasy.
KevinScale Rating: 3.5/5
therein, Therin. 