Wild Grass

As silly as it is to look for trends in the cinema, sometimes they're just so esoteric that they're too fun not to share. If 2010 has a thread I never expected to see, it's the emergence of a few off-the-wall, brilliant romantic comedies. Rom-coms have become a one-stop shop for the worst of commercial cinema lately, removing the charm and wit that once characterized the genre as one of the most rewarding of mainstream types and turning it into a juggernaut of weak titillation, barren emotion and the most reductive stereotypes in film.

Wild Grass, which premiered to great ballyhoo at last year's Cannes Festival, finally got a U.S. limited release in July of this year before quietly coming to DVD last Tuesday stands with Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy as a romantic comedy that returns to the roots of the genre as a screwball outpouring of the silliest, most ebullient joy the early talkies had to offer. And like Certified Copy, Wild Grass is informed by cinema. Helmed by the 87-year-old Alain Resnais, the film is also but the latest evidence that the cheekiest, freshest and most giddily cinematic films made this year have almost exclusively been made by those above the age of 65 (see also: Kiarostami, Polanski, Scorsese).

The film opens with a zoom-in on an old castle rook overgrown with vegetation before cutting to a piece of cracked asphalt with grass starting to creep through the break. The shot becomes something of a leitmotif throughout the film, with the grass growing ever longer as the narrative progresses. The initial edits are light and springy, with the camera placed low on the vertical axis as it moves through shots until Resnais comes to crowded streets. Rather than the usual shots of endless bored faces, Resnais photographs their feet trotting along en masse. In a move that would have Quentin Tarantino panting in jealousy, Resnais follows a single pair of feet until they reach, naturally, a shoe boutique where an attendant tries out each pump as the camera pulls back enough not to reveal this mystery woman's face. Even when Resnais freezes everything and tracks around her, the actress slowly pivots with the camera, leaving us only with the sight of her frazzled ball of red hair.

That sense of ingenuity powers the film far more than its plot, which could be basically described as follows: on her way out of the store, the woman, Marguerite (Sabine Azéma), a dentist, gets robbed by a thief who skates by and takes her purse. Later that day, George Palat (André Dussollier), a man in his 50s, stumbles across her emptied wallet in the shopping center's parking garage and develops a crush on her ID photo. He proceeds to stalk her until the police get involved, at which point he stops, only for Marguerite to suddenly display a curious interest in Georges.

There it is in essence, but what makes Wild Grass so charming and unexpected is the spin Resnais puts on the material. I am by no means an expert on the director, having seen only Hiroshima Mon Amour, Night and Fog and Last Year at Marienbad, but even those films give an adequate taste of Resnais' style. In Wild Grass, the director displays more visual wit than someone a third his age: as Georges drives his car, tiny thought bubbles appear that show him rehearsing and fantasizing scenarios, turning the casual handover of someone's lost property into the breakthrough into romance, rehearsing his phone call to her in his head as if a teenage boy practicing asking someone to the prom. When he drops the wallet off at a police station, he ends up debating Marguerite's attractiveness with the officer who takes his info (Mathieu Amalric!). The officer scoffs at her ID photo, but Georges pulls out Marguerite's aviation license with a more flattering photo and the cop seems to consider it as if the two were frat buddies debating the hotness of some chick.

Eventually, Georges' behavior grows more erratic. Seemingly content with his home life (and his younger, doting wife), the man cannot keep his thoughts from Marguerite. His inner monologues betray a disturbing propensity for violence with the vague hint that he's done something in the past. When two young women pass him in the parking garage at the start, he jumps to thoughts of strangling them. At the police station, he worries officers will recognize him.

Resnais' camera dances around the action, moving in leaps, swirls, smooth tracking shots and zooms. Occasionally, the direction becomes more frantic, using handheld shots of Georges' family life to show how he feels uncomfortable in what seems the perfect life. When the police come to question him about stalking Marguerite, each question the cops ask, however innocuous, is delivered through quick-zooms on the officers. Resnais then moves to a POV shot looking down as Georges leaps from his chair and shouts at the officer, then he cuts back to show Georges standing at the end of the room. It's not altogether clear if anyone's actually in the room with him at that point, though the sheer distance he got by leaping from his chair is comic in its own right.

Georges' slashing of Marguerite's tires when she does not respond to his letters or phone calls is a twisted act that speaks to inner demons, but Resnais frames that outburst, and all others, as a battle between id and superego without delineation. One can easily differentiate between sanity and madness in something like Fight Club once you learn the steps, but Wild Grass stays elusive. You can never be sure what's motivating Georges from one moment to the next; hell, you can't even be sure whether what we're seeing on the screen is even happening. Georges, not only mourning his father's passing but subconsciously focusing on his own mortality, appears to be suffering from mild memory loss, the kind that doesn't necessarily suggest anything wrong but signals at the very least the transition into old age. Faced with a life that's a bit too calm, he fills the gaps with fanciful ideas of a dangerous past.

Georges finally agrees to back down and settle back with his family, only for Marguerite to start chasing him. If Georges began to fantasize as a way to stave of thoughts of old age and wasted life, Marguerite has reveries simply to escape the doldrums of the present. At work, she's so distracted that she heedlessly causes pain to her patients, and she looks to her refurbished Spitfire with almost fetishistic admiration, even resting her head on its fuselage as if cuddling up with a lover. When her stalker finally backs down, some part of her misses the excitement. She even begins to meet in person with Georges, further confusing an already addled man. Her friend and business partner, Josépha (Emmanuelle Devos), confronts the man at one point, but it is Marguerite who looks hurt by the demand to be left alone. And as Georges came to her apartment, so too does Marguerite come to his home and interact with his family. She even has Josépha seduce Georges while she speaks with the wife, only for Georges to return and try and cast her out. He is unsuccessful.

"Everything is excusable," Georges says in one of his early reveries before amending himself. "Not everything, not bad taste." Wild Grass exists in its own world where the most gaudy and self-apparent camera movements create the story rather than hang off a narrative as adornment. The camera turns a pointless rom-com into an open-ended feature that blurs genre lines. Accompanied by the riotously ominous music by Mark Snow (of X-Files fame), Resnais' camera adds the suspense of a paranoid thriller, and no joke in the film is as funny as the constant deflation of this false unease. At the break between Georges pursuing Marguerite and her chasing him, Georges goes to a midnight showing the old war film The Bridges of Toko-Ri, and the split in the film is offset by the epic 20th Century Fox theme. Resnais uses it again for a false ending, already subverting the usage of the theme as something that announces the start of a film in order to end one, then throwing all that away and moving into the real ending, which is even more baffling.

Wild Grass may be nothing more than an 87-year-old's attempt to prove he's still got some charm. But he succeeds brilliantly, so who am I to knock the film? This is not shaping up to be a year in which cinema uncovers the truths of where we are as a society. Then again, in so political a year as this, it's nice to be spared, for the most part, the usual preaching. That 2010 is instead destined to be a year in which some of the more intriguing stylistic exercises in some time have been released domestically offers some measurable comfort in the face of overwhelming mediocrity offered up at the multiplex. With its screwball wit and its artistic sophistication, Wild Grass is as fundamentally dispensable yet incessantly fun as all the action blockbusters this year failed to be.

Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)

Nothing makes sense in Alain Resnais' 1961 opus Last Year at Marienbad, or maybe everything makes sense. Variously described as modern, postmodern, symbolic and surrealist (the latter being the most appropriate term), Last Year at Marienbad has been dissected by critics searching for its meaning for nearly five decades, over the director's claims that it has none. Resnais might be telling the truth, or he might just be teasing all those who dare tackle the impenetrable non-narrative. Jean-Luc Godard famously said that a film "should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order," but it is this film, by a contemporary of the French New Wave but not a member, that puts his theory to the test.

The film takes place in an opulent chateau in an unspecified location, an expansive hotel with endless corridors, grand halls and geometrically pure hedges and architecture. It's the sort of place so perfect it can only come from the chaotic abandon of dreams. In certain shots, the halls are filled with wealthy guests, and elsewhere they are barren and cold. Often, the shots containing patrons are as lifeless as those without them.

Only three characters have any substantial dialogue, and even their names reflect the coldness of these people. A man identified only as X (Giorgio Albertazzi) narrates the film, his thoughts and memories never seeming to line up with the images on screen. He walks up to a woman, A (Delphine Seyrig). "Didn't we meet at Marienbad last year?" he asks. She politely says no. But X insists, and lists off his memories of their encounter.

But are those memories genuine? That's the chief question of the film, and the one you must put behind you as quickly as possible. X's tales slip in and out of diegesis; occasionally the events on the screen match what he's describing, but even then it's hard to tell if he's describing the present, the past or some fantastical interpretation of the two. Eventually, A begins to beg X to leave her alone, but without a hint of conviction.

When he's not trying to woo the woman, X plays games with the other guests, chiefly "M" (Sacha Pitoëff). They play a game where cards, matchsticks or any other objects are arranged into four rows, and each player removes objects in each row, until the loser is stuck with the last one. Pitoëff is a fearsome looker, with the high cheekbones and overbite that just beg to be cast in a vampire movie. M wins every game against every opponent; "I can lose," he slyly confides, "but I always win." Later, X returns to A and, in the course of his monologue, he mentions A's husband, only for the camera to cut to M. Whether M is indeed her husband or lover is unclear, but he certainly exerts some sort of authority over her.

The rest of the film is -- and this is as close to a plot as I can muster -- a struggle between the men for A. Their version of Pim becomes a symbol of their duel, as X cannot ever win, and when it looks like he might actually triumph, M settles for the nuclear option: in one sequence, A actually dies, only to remain alive for the rest of the film. Her wardrobe also vacillates at numerous intervals, from white to black to some mad, feathered thing. The relationships among the three do not change throughout the film, and when X and A part, the film fades to black and ends, the dream over.

Aiding Resnais and writer Alain Robbe-Grillet's mad vision are the talents of cinematographer Sacha Vierny and composer Francis Seyrig. Marienbad contains ubiquitous shots of mirrors and uses shadows and lighting as the only means of differentiating between the "present" and "past." Vierny and his subordinates must have had a hell of time capturing the numerous tracking shots through halls of mirrors without filming themselves, and the look of the film is absolutely flawless (though even Criterion's new issue does not use a perfect print of the film). The most famous shot is likely the one of the courtyard, and for good reason: when the pair rush out of the chateau, they find themselves overlooking the garden, filled with precise geometric hedges. But what makes the shot so lasting is the fact that the people in frame cast long shadows while the plants cast none at all. What effort it must have taken for so brief a moment, and what an effect it has.


Seyrig's music, on the other hand, is ugly. It serves to add to X's increasingly unsettling pleas and stories, and it sounds more like the score for an old Hammer horror picture than an appropriate accompaniment for wealthy people relaxing in a hotel. But that music effectively sets the mood for the film, and it is the only constant for us to identify with.

I suppose I should be asking myself, or even you the reader, what this film means. Consider the opening shots that depict nothing but the empty halls that obey no ordinary laws of spatial or temporal relationships (neither do the characters when they enter). When Resnais' camera at last passes over the chateau guests for the first time, they appear frozen in time. Finally, they move, and we see that we were watching a play. But when the director scans the audience, it's nearly impossible to differentiate between the viewer and the participant.

Does that mean, then, that Last Year at Marienbad is a commentary on art, on film? Perhaps, but I find that too simple an answer; too often we interpret films as being about film, and that shortchanges them. Even films that do work with the backdrop of film, or theatre, tend to use them to make some grander statement. A film like The Purple Rose of Cairo isn't so much a celebration of movies as what gives us joy in our miserable lives. That films would be the thing to inspire or defeat in these movies is the natural product of having been written by filmmakers.

After finishing the film, I went back to the DVD menu in the hopes of listening to the usual Criterion commentary track that covers every possible facet of the production and breaks down each shot -- I heartily recommend author Stephen Prince's absurdly in-depth tracks on various Kurosawa films. To my surprise, Marienbad, the film that warrants someone guiding us more than any other film I can think of at the moment, doesn't come with one. Perhaps that's just as well; all the talk of "psychoanalytic theory" and "phenomenology" I stumbled across to get some clear picture of what this film only served to lessen its impact on me, and damn near every interpretation is wildly different and contradictory, both with other analyses and itself.

So then, maybe Last Year at Marienbad has no meaning, as the director suggests. It is certainly the finest piece of surrealist cinema I've seen, though that's not exactly an impressive feat given my unfamiliarity outside of Buñuel, Meshes of an Afternoon and Dog Star Man. It's also impressive that so strange a film can move at so deliberate a pace, as most experimental fare keeps things brief to ensure that the assault of imagery has maximum effect; even Buñuel's longer works have some solid satire to latch onto to justify their lengths. Thus, Last Year at Marienbad is trying in the age of instant satisfaction via the Internet, though it was trying back in 1961 as well, I wager. Those who do not throw up their hands and leave after 10 minutes, though, will be treated to one of the great masterpieces the art form has ever produced. I'm set to get a Blu-Ray player next week, and this film shot to the top of the heap of films to buy for it.

Cinema is rightly regarded as having its own language, but I like to think it speaks in multiple tongues: the action films are Teutonic, the cold psychological dramas Scandinavian, the romance films, well, one of the romantic languages.. Last Year in Marienbad bypasses all of it: with its vivid imagery, its lack of narrative and its utter fearlessness, it is cinematic language at its most beautifully primal.