Wild Grass (2009, Alain Renais)"No, that's impossible. Am I at peace? Not since I met you."And to think their story began all because she couldn't find the right shoe size.
The most recent film from Alain Renais (Night and Fog, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year in Marienbad) is quite gentle and relaxing, while still subversive enough that the more I think about it, the stranger the experience I had with it. It's something you can't really shrug off because of how surreal of an experience it is that it leaves you with such realistic feelings. Does that make sense? No? Well, this art-house film isn't the easiest to break down like I normally like to do for MDC dictations, but here is what I've got.
The film is based on the surrealist novel The Incident by Christian Gailly. It follows a woman whose purse is stolen and when the thief ditches the wallet in a parking lot, a man named Georges finds it and debates on how he wants to notify the owner of the wallet because he is smitten with her ID picture. That is only the first ten to twenty minutes so I'll stop there, but of course the characters soon find their destinies intertwined as they interact through letters, phone calls, and meetings and those usually start with some harmless stalking. The end result is something that is a typical narrative and (for lack of a better word, I mean it) artsy and creative. I didn't find the film as humorous as others might have. There were moments of irony, but I was more attracted to the romanticism and the uniquely unconventional courtship between these two characters.
The cinematography by Eric Gautier (A Christmas Tale, Into the Wild) is dazzling and clear and the music of Mark Snow (The X-Files) echoes the jazz of Lalo Schifrin. The best performance in the movie for me comes from Andre Dussollier. He is both exhaustingly tired and emotional. A brilliant piece of acting. Now, I now Renais was part of that New Wave side group with Agnes Varda, Louis Malle, and a bunch of other people that make stuff that is too smart for me, but I've determined a fun fact. If Mathieu Amalric is walking around and speaking French... it's probably going to be a good movie. Yes, I'm being tongue-in-cheek, but that is the kind of mood this film has put me in.
Wild Grass makes it clear that life is pretty accidental for those of us that don't think our "life-path" has been written. So what happens when we try to control it? The result can be tragic. The result can be funny. But most importantly of all, the result will be full of energy. Life is lively, pun intended.
Thanks for the dictation.