Ervas Daninhas

Well I don't know what it was about. Maybe there wasn't much going on. The wild grass must have symbolized something seeing as it kept cropping up all the time. The premise for the romance was interesting I suppose. There was a very playful element to the film, both in the form and the narrative. It's just an "art" film in the end. No excuses. Funny thing is, I really enjoyed it and couldn't take my eyes off the screen. Totally bizarre ending, which fit the film very nicely. I suppose it helps to come into the movie with low expectations. Don't get awed by the name Resnais (my god, but wasn't Last Year in Marienbad pointless? and compelling?). It's a fun little movie.

Alain Resnais started as a French new wave director and is remembered for creating such classics as Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) and Last Year in Marienbad (1961). He often deals with the layers of memory, yearning, oblivion and death in man. He throws his characters into a story and sees what the fuss occurs. His latest film Les herbes folles or Wild Grass is a psychotic version of the conventional genre of romantic comedy. Les herbes folles is a new kind of comedy; it challenges the limitations of cinema and the fantastic imaginative narrative is something we haven't seen in decades.

A pickpocket steals a wallet of a woman. A man finds the wallet and since it has an ID card within he decides to return it to its owner. After a series of difficulties the woman gets her wallet but the man seems to be hoping for something more between them.

The characterization of the film is simplified but strong, it makes us question the role of a character in fiction. Marquerite (the woman) is purely a fictional figure: red haired dentist who loves flying. Georges (the man) is an ordinary suburban dad who has got a dangerously unstable personality. He thinks about murders and crimes, but is it all fantasy or could he actually do it? The character remains elusive, and I loved it.

Les herbes folles was Alain Resnais' first adaption from a novel, even that he has worked with many famous writers such as Marquarite Duras. Les herbes folles is based on a novel "L'Incident" by Christian Gailly. Alain Resnais has always adored "cheap" literature and the things he got from this small unknown novel amaze me. What I've heard is that Gailly's narrative is minimalist but the narrative of Les herbes folles in obviously the opposite. The 'mise-en-scene' is filled with precisely considered items that yet appear as ordinary furniture. An important addition Resnais made for the novel is the wild grass which grows from the gaps of the asphalt streets. Just as the grass so do the passions and desires of the characters run wild.

The visuality of Les herbes folles is imaginative and enchanting. Already in 1959 Resnais made innovative use of flashback in Hiroshima, mon amour and in Les herbes folles he mixes flashbacks, delusions and fantasies in a very unique, absurd way - overall the film is a courageously playful story. Both the editing and cinematography overwhelmed me they just make this a very aesthetic experience. The scene with the cops is full of close-up, stylized editing and quick zoom-ins and this absurd use of camera just reinforces the Kafkaesque in the entire scene.

Les herbes folles is a new beginning in a way, it's something Resnais has never done before and I hope we will see many great ones by him in the future as well. It's a film which plays around with cinema narrative with stylized editing and simplified characterization. In the end it grows out to be a mature antithesis for brainless romantic comedies and a wonderful aesthetic experience.

The great master of the French cinema, Alain Resnais, has produced this bizarre, brilliantly made and intensely surrealist 'crazy masterpiece'. It is based upon a novel entitled 'l'Incident' ('The Incident') with which I am unfamiliar, so it is difficult to know how much of this film originated from the febrile brain of Resnais himself. The story and its treatment carry on the long-standing French traditions of two literary movements: surrealism and 'unanisme'. The surrealist input is immediately obvious, because the story itself, although realistically portrayed, is inherently entirely surrealist. It begins with an 'incident', namely the theft of a purse from a woman who has been shopping in the Palais Royale in Paris. For several minutes we do not even see her face, but only the back of her head, and her face only appears for the first time floating in a bath. It was André Breton's famous surrealist novel 'Nadja' which focused the minds of the entire French intelligentsia upon the importance of chance events which lead to chains of further complications and create a whole alternative future to that which might have been. (Kieslowski and other film directors have exploited this motif in numerous films.) This story commences in just such a way. And then further chance events ensue, such as the man finding the stolen purse and becoming obsessed with the woman who owned it, especially because she has a pilot's licence in the purse and he is obsessed by airplanes and female solo pilots. The influence of 'unanisme' on this story is shown by the intense portrayals of only tiny portions of the backgrounds, stories, and motives of the characters, with the emphasis being given to them acting as a group, and we the viewers being left to imagine the rest. In other words, exposition is below the minimum, and we never do learn what is wrong with all these crazy people, and it is their interrelations which dominate. These techniques were above all pioneered and demonstrated by the French novelist Jules Romains, who founded the literary movement known as 'unanisme'. Having read 27 novels by Romains, I have more than a passing familiarity with his work. It has been more influential than people tend to realize. It must be kept firmly in mind that this Resnais film contains a great deal of gnomic humour and sly jokes. It is not meant to be taken any more seriously than life itself. Some of the references are incomprehensible, as they are doubtless meant to be: why do we keep seeing the camera moving over swaying wild grass in a field? Why do we see so many pavement cracks with tufts of wild grass growing out of them? We shall never know. Many of the shots, editing, compositions, angles, and moods are so outstanding that we can see clearly that Resnais has lost none of his genius in his long career. As always, much in this film is never meant to be explained, but is only suggested, and we can make of it what we will. All of the leading characters are eventually shown to be seriously mentally unbalanced, and I take this as Resnais's view of humanity generally. And who can say he is wrong? There is a lot to be said for the theory that everybody is insane. That would then explain everything about the world. In fact, the only sane person in this film seems to be the little girl who asks about the cat munchies. And we do not even know who she is. This film is funny, sad, shocking, upsetting, provocative, thoughtful, disturbing, incomprehensible, deeply meaningful, irrational, profound, and many other things besides, but why use up all the adjectives when there is a compulsively fascinating movie to watch instead.

Wild Grass begins, more or less, with a man finding a stolen wallet and returning it to the woman it belongs to. He then becomes obsessed with said woman and stalks and harasses her. She falls obsessively in love with him in turn, like you do.

Okay, let's cut straight to the point: the script is dreck, concealing its misogyny under layers of nonsensical character interaction and forced quirk. Cinephiles, who have never been really concerned with scripts in the first place, have lapped this up and praised it as a sign that the octogenarian Renais still has it. (And as an aside, it is totally badass that him and Godard are both still making films at this point.) And that's not wrong. The actual film has all of the charm the script lacks: it looks gorgeous, and between the lead actors and Resnais's idiosyncratic directing the film manifests most of the charm its script tries for.

And that's all well and good, but a film cannot subsist on charm alone. It's no a long movie, but the back half felt like an eternity to me. If you like movies where people wander around Paris and talk about old movies, this one is for you. If you don't, this is pretty to look at, but it's best not to look beneath the surface.

WILD GRASS (LES HERBES FOLLES) is based on the novel 'L'incident' by Christian Gailly, a writer who delights in taking simple incidents and pushing them to the extremes of climax beyond which few would ever dream. But Alain Resnais has taken this novel (adapted by Alex Reval and Laurent Herbiet), infused it with his own characteristic joy of playing reality versus imagination, memory versus illusion, and has come up with a film that will likely have a limited audience, but for those who delight in letting go and simply flying along with the imagination of a genius or two, then WILD GRASS will satisfy and more.

The story is a romance in the manner of a hesitation waltz. The story is narrated (by Edouard Baer) to give the opening aspects of the story momentum. Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azéma), a dentist and Spitfire pilot, has just purchased shoes and leaves the store when her handbag is snatched by a running thief. Later, the aging Georges Palet (André Dussollier) finds a red wallet in a parking lot, examines the contents, struggles with the burden of what to do, and finally turns the wallet in to the police, Bernard de Bordeaux (Mathieu Amalric) who takes his name in case there is a reward. Georges returns home to his wife Suzanne (Anne Consigny), who understands that Georges' strange behavior since his father's recent death may be enhanced by a new predicament: Georges is worried about the incident. He places telephone calls to Marguerite, visits her home, writers her letters - all of which confounds him as to his obsession with the woman he has never met. Georges family (he has two children) find his preoccupation strange and indeed Georges seems to have a dark secret from his past that causes him to have minor verbal explosions that seem wholly inappropriate. The incident becomes his life.

Meanwhile Marguerite shares her 'stalker' with her fellow dental assistant Josepha (Emmanuelle Devos) who attempts to manage Marguerite's change in behavior. Marguerite now is the one who needs to know more about Georges and stalks him. Ultimately Marguerite invites Georges to accompany her and her fellow pilots on a practice flight and a wildly entertaining practice flight game ensues: both Georges and Marguerite navigate the social protocols of giving and acknowledging appreciation and this bizarre catch as catch can romance comes to a Hollywood end - complete with flashbacks to old films etc. The audience is left to figure out just what has really happened - is this a wild love story on a collision course or is it simply a pair of fantasias played by two strange, emotionally isolated, and bored people, longing for life to perk up a bit?

Just as the title WILD GRASS suggests, little incidents (or invasions of wild grass into cracks and interstices quite by accident) can cause a butterfly effect and that is where the now 87 year old Resnais feels most at home. The irresistibly colorful cinematography is courtesy Eric Gautier and the perfect musical scoring is by Mark Snow. The danger in any kind of surrealism theme is that the audience becomes concerned that much of it doesn't make since. And so it is here, where even with the aid of the narrator there are many twists and turns that seem simply flights of fancy - and they probably are!

Grady Harp