53rd San Francisco International Film Festival 22 April - 6 May 2010
FILMS/
WILD GRASS
Les herbes folles
World Cinema
France/Italy, 2009, 104 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Thu, Apr 29 / 6:45 / Kabuki / WILD29K
Thu, May 06 / 8:45 / Kabuki / WILD06K
CREDITS
- dir
-
Alain Resnais
- prod
-
Jean-Louis Livi
- scr
-
Alex Réval, Laurent Herbiet
- cam
-
Eric Gautier
- editor
-
Hervé de Luze
- mus
-
Mark Snow
- cast
-
Sabine Azéma, André Dussolier, Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric
- source
-
Sony Pictures Classics, 550 Madison Avenue, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10022. EMAIL: sony_classics@spe.sony.com.
Alain Resnais is deservedly classed among the masters of world cinema, but “mastery” might be the wrong term to describe his method: Almost 50 years after Last Year at Marienbad, Resnais remains dedicated to experimentation, imagination and games of chance. Wild Grass, based on the novel L’Incident by Christian Gailly and titled after those stubborn weeds that erupt from cracks in the pavement, is an ode to uncontrolled impulse and the possibilities—effervescent or ominous, sublime or absurd—that arise from accident. The triggering incident is fairly ordinary: A woman goes out shopping for shoes and has her purse snatched; a man goes out to buy a watch battery and stumbles upon the woman’s red wallet. Out of these chinks in everyday routine grow a tangle of unruly emotions, as the man, Georges (André Dussollier), develops an inexplicable obsession with the woman, Marguerite (Sabine Azéma), a dentist and amateur aviatrix. Is Georges a melancholy romantic, an aging husband in the throes of some ongoing midlife crisis or a dangerous psychotic? Is Marguerite, with her staring eyes and blaze of scarlet hair, an endearing eccentric or has she entirely taken leave of her senses? Is Wild Grass a thriller, a screwball comedy, a love story? With false starts and false endings, sudden shifts of palette and a mood-swinging score, Resnais plays it as all three, and as something else entirely. As the weirdly omniscient narrator reminds us, “After the cinema, nothing surprises you. Anything can happen.”
—Juliet Clark
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