OK so some critics have been raving about this one if the posters and adverts are to be believed. And I have sort of broken my rule and read a review. Sort of, because I read it after I'd seen the film but before I'd written down my own thoughts.
My reason for this is because I wanted to see if I was missing something.
You have two characters Marguerite and Georges who, quite separately, live ordinary, run of the mill lives. Then one day Marguerite has her handbag snatched. Her purse is later found by George having been dumped by his car in the car park of a shopping centre.
He starts to obsess about Marguerite, imaging what type of women she is based on the photos and pilots license in her purse. He has imaginary conversations with her over the telephone and seems take a ridiculously long time deliberating over what to do about the purse. Eventually he hands it in to the police who return it to Marguerite.
She phones Georges to thank him and thus begins her own obsession with what Georges is like. It culminates in a bizarre cycle of stalking and rejection.
There are hints that Georges has some sort of sinister past which hangs like a threat over the whole relationship but doesn't quite manifest itself into anything more dramatic than his slashing her car tyres. Marguerite a seemingly sensible, level-headed women is prone to fits of day-dreaming and fantasy which result in her own irrational behaviour.
Now while I was watching it I was convinced that much of what was happening was going on in Marguerite's and Georges heads, their way of brightening up their otherwise mundane lives. But the further the film went on the less likely this interpretation seemed. Georges' otherwise rational wife seems to accept his obsession with Marguerite and her frequent telephone calls and then visits to the house without a flicker of alarm. While Marguerite's friend and business partner teases her about Georges she nonetheless seems all to happy to be complicit in their weird relationship.
The end is just plain bizarre if not wholly predictable: (plot spoiler) Marguerite takes Georges and his wife up for a pleasure flight in her plane and it crashes after doing a series of stunts for which the plane is not designed. I almost think that the writers realising they'd left themselves no where to go other than to kill them off. The plane loops the loop and then nose-dives which is rather representative of the plot.
It's funny but now I'm writing down my thoughts it is actually making me realise how unsatisfying the whole film is. The one review I read was from Empire magazine in which the reviewer says:
But, by playing with generic convention and the paraphernalia of screen technique, Resnais transforms it into a dazzling tribute to classical cinema that wryly, poignantly and provocatively revisits such trademark themes as time, space, memory, causality and subjective reality.
I would agree with its wryness and it is certainly provocative but poignant? It is too disturbing in a baffling sort of way to be poignant. I don't know enough about 'classical' cinema to judge whether it is indeed a tribute.
If it had all been a dream, although cheesy it would have been far more satisfying. Wild Grass is like a big, slightly tough, chunk of steak that you get bored of chewing on.
These are the first two reviews that came up in a google search so it seems I'm not just a philistine who can't appreciate French art house:
The Telegraph gave it three stars saying: The effect is by turns frisky and baffling, but Eric Gautier’s luscious
cinematography is a boon, the camera swooping and gliding as if
joyfully
complicit in the characters’ reckless flights of fancy.
Jason Solomans in The Guardian describes it as a 'tiresome whimsy'
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