Grimerlana Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

VeteranLight I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Syl I don't know much about French film director, Alain Resnais, until now. This film is strange to say the least. I bought the French films when the video store closed. I have spent this summer catching up on DVDs and videos in hopes of cleaning up my collection. This film is about two people, Georges, and Marguerite. By chance, Georges finds her red wallet and returns it to the police. The red wallet symbolizes Marguerite's life and identity. Both are unhappy with their lives. They find something in each other. Marguerite has red hair and it sticks out just like her red wallet. Georges is married for a long time to his wife. Their interaction is more like a partnership. The ending is abstract, strange, and ambiguous. The film has its moments. The actors are great.

wandereramor 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.

Roland E. Zwick By turns cerebral, thought-provoking, pretentious and off-putting, "Wild Grass" is a tale of two strangers who become inexplicably obsessed with one another.Adapted by Alex Reval and Laurent Herbiet from the novel "L'Incident" by Christian Gailly, and directed by the legendary French New Waver Alain Resnais, "Wild Grass" focuses on what happens after Georges (Andrei Dussollier), a middle-aged married man who's an aviation aficionado and all-around nut-case, finds a stolen wallet belonging to Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azema), a frizzy-haired (could it be the "wild grass" of the title?) red-headed dentist who flies propeller planes in her spare time. Without even knowing the woman, Georges finds himself inexorably drawn to her, and he'll stop at nothing to insinuate himself into her life. In turn, Marguerite, a single woman who appears to have been boycotting beauty salons her whole life, develops mixed feelings for this man who has essentially become a stalker and who has even gone so far as to slash the tires on her car. And before you know it, Marguerite has become so unstrung and neurotic in her own right that she's sleeping in the cockpit of her plane and has become such a sadist with the dental drill that she would give Dr. Christian Szell - or the Marquis de Sade, for that matter - a run for his money in a pain-inflicting sweepstakes.The off-putting nature of the film comes from the fact that the characters often feel more like the product of a writer's imagination than organic outgrowths from the real world. Their motivations and responses are almost maddeningly preposterous and unclear at times and, as a consequence, our patience with their behavior wears decidedly thin after awhile. There are other distractions as well, such as Marguerite's extraordinarily unmanaged Little Orphan Annie coiffure (we find ourselves wanting to cry out, "Why don't you run a damn comb through that thing?") and the self-conscious cinephilia that is oh-so-typical of French filmmakers.On the positive side, Resnais manages to achieve a hypnotic rhythm with his fluidly flowing tracking shots, and there are definitely some elements of style and theme from some of Resnais' bona fide classics, like "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" and "Last Year at Marienbad," running through this work (the nature of intimacy between strangers and near-strangers being just one of the issues touched upon in all three films).However, these few virtues are not enough to overcome the unlikable nature of the storyline and the two loony and self-absorbed folk who serve as its protagonists. So I guess it's only appropriate that the movie culminate in a spectacularly stupid and laughable into-the-wild-blue-yonder finale that literally, as well as figuratively, crashes and burns on its way to that much delayed but highly appreciated "fin," signaling the end of our ordeal. A fond farewell to all around.

dbairdk Wild Grass is filled with visual joy and playful surprises. It left me smiling from beginning to end. With a brilliant cast and incredible cinematography that will playfully take viewers from blue skies above to the very human folly down below, the story celebrates cinema storytelling itself, as well as our human wish to find some of that movie magic in our daily lives, no matter the consequences. Resnais is now 88 year old (or perhaps 88 years young, more appropriately), for he has created a cinematic cocktail that leaves viewers dizzy with delight and ready to ask the local projectionist to: "pour me another. I want to experience that again!"