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Wild Grass review - No signs of creative burn-out for Alain Resnais, the pioneering French New Wave director who’s now 88.
His latest is a playful, enigmatic yarn in which love propels its characters to behave in the strangest ways and a third-person narrator provides a clever foil.
When middle-aged Parisian Georges (André Dussollier), a married man with plenty of spare time on his hands, discovers a stolen red wallet in an underground car park, it triggers in him a romantic obsession with the wallet’s owner, flame-haired dentist Marguerite (Sabine Azéma).
Thanks partly to the interventions of a policeman (Mathieu Amalric) and Marguerite’s colleague (Emmanuelle Devos), Wild Grass heads off in all kinds of unexpected directions, the irrational mood heightened by Eric Gautier’s swooping, soaring camerawork and the vibrant primary colours that fill the screen.
A wonderfully eccentric offering from Resnais, with fine ensemble performances to match.
