From his first films, Alain Resnais confounded viewers with a conjurer's bag of modernist trickery, sliding about in time and memory. But it was sheer pleasure puzzling out such early classics as Hiroshima, mon amour and Last Year atMarienbad. Now, at 87, Resnais is still making cryptic, purposefully illogical narratives, but only devotees will be thrilled this time out.
The whiff of a story: aging married man Georges (André Dussollier) finds the stolen wallet of flighty redhead Marguerite (Sabine Azéma) and becomes instantly enamored, willing to forfeit his domestic happiness to pursue her. For much of the film, she's turned off by his stalking; then she becomes the stalker.
All the characters are mysterious, and all their motivations are incomprehensible, though it somehow seems important that Marguerite is a weekend pilot. But even when it's exasperating, Wild Grass is lovely to look at (Eric Gautier did the cinematography) and strikingly edited. And Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos are fun to watch in kitschy, improbable roles as, respectively, a cop and a dentist.
