Grazin' in the "Grass" is a gas baby can you dig it...

I wrote at some length in the fall of last year about Alain Resnais’ remark­able new film Wild Grass, which had then premiered at The New York Film Festival, which I see is get­ting a the­at­ric­al run, at least in New York, start­ing tomor­row. I’d say it is one of the more note­worthy pic­tures open­ing tomor­row, or at any time for that mat­ter. For your con­veni­ence, I repro­duce below what I wrote in September:

* About twenty minutes into my first view­ing of this utterly beguil­ing film, observing the bizarre beha­vi­or of one of its lead char­ac­ters Georges Palet (an exquis­ite per­form­ance by André Dussolier), and won­der­ing what the hell his deal was—dementia? psychosis?—I duti­fully scribbled in my note­book “the refus­al of patho­logy.” In a real­ist­ic film they’d be cart­ing the guy off to a men­tal hos­pit­al pretty quick. And then of course I remembered that Resnais has nev­er in a mil­lion years made a real­ist­ic film. Even his films about very real and very pro­found top­ics—Night and Fog, on the Holocaust; Hiroshima mon amour, on, well,  guess; Muriel…, on (obliquely) the French occu­pa­tion of Algeria; La guerre est finie, on revolu­tion and revolu­tion­ary action—are most com­pelled by ima­gin­at­ive strategies, not doc­u­ment­at­ive ones. Resnais, of course, has always known this. Scott Foundas notes, in an inter­view with Resnais in The Village Voice this week, that the dir­ect­or “bristles” when presen­ted with the notion that “the con­di­tion­al nature of memory…has been anoth­er career-spanning pre­oc­cu­pa­tion.” “I prefer to say ‘the ima­gin­ary,’ ” Resnais coun­ters. “All of our lives, we live with the memory of a sad exper­i­ence, or a pleas­ant one, and, thanks to those memor­ies, we try to avoid oth­er sad exper­i­ences and try to repeat pleas­ant ones. But we don’t remem­ber things exactly as they happened, thanks to the chem­ic­al pro­cesses of the brain. A memory that’s too short does­n’t suf­fice; with the ima­gin­ary, one can retain everything.” 

Quite true (and see also Resnais’ Mon oncle d’Amerique re brain chem­istry), and it’s instruct­ive to reflect on how the ini­tially brief encoun­ters between cer­tain of Wild Grass’ char­ac­ters affects both their ima­gin­at­ive world, and the ima­gin­at­ive world of the film. And that con­vey­ing these ima­gin­at­ive worlds is of course going to be a func­tion of cam­era place­ment, cam­era move­ment, col­or, and optic­al effects. Which is one reas­on I dis­agree with my esteemed colleau­ge Richard Brody when he says that here “Resnais’ vir­tu­os­ity with the cam­era merely passes the time on screen as the mech­an­isms of his script grind along.”

* Resnais told the assembly at the press con­fer­ence that Christian Gailly, the nov­el­ist whose L’incidentprovided the basis for the screen­play by Alex Reval and Laurent Herbier, was a jazz musi­cian of many years’ stand­ing before he took up lit­er­at­ure. Resnais enjoys Gailly’s work in part because it reminds him of jazz impro­visa­tion. As Foundas notes of Wild Grass in his Resnais inter­view, “the film zig-zags zanily from one genre to the next.” It does so, on occa­sion, in a mat­ter of mere shots, the way a bop instru­ment­al­ist may inter­pol­ate a quote from “Pop Goes The Weasel” into a solo on a bal­lad, or some such. I am also reminded of some­thing said about the work of Resnais’ erstwhile col­lab­or­at­or Alain Robbe-Grillet (I don’t know wheth­er he was a jazz fan, but I sus­pect maybe not): that therein, “the nar­rat­ive is in search of its own coher­ence.” The series of false end­ings lead­ing up to Wild Grass’ hil­ari­ous and cos­mic­ally stag­ger­ing final shot con­sti­tute one of the most bra­cing examples of this prin­ciple in action that con­tem­por­ary cinema has to offer.

* Watching the way the char­ac­ters’ irra­tion­al­it­ies seemed to rub off on each oth­er, I was reminded of one of the most legendary unreal­ized pro­jects in late 20^th-century cinema: David Lynch’s One Saliva Bubble, or at least of my memory of what it was sup­posed to have been. Or, rather, my ima­gin­at­ive pro­jec­tion with­in my memory of what it was sup­posed to have been. That is, I thought some sort of con­ta­gion with­in a saliva bubble that got passed from char­ac­ter to char­ac­ter affected their beha­vi­or. Although as it hap­pens, the real­ity of the Lynch/Mark Frost script was that the tit­u­lar bubble cre­ates an elec­tric­al short-circuit that unleashes a psy­cho­trop­ic behavior-affecting beam on an unsus­pect­ing town. 

But in any event, it was­n’t just the premise of Wild Grass but its tone that put Lynch in my head. It then occured to me that in some ways, through­out his career Resnais was cre­at­ing a more gen­teel, less sexu­ally mor­bid mani­fest­a­tion of “the Lynchian” avant le lettre, going back as far as the phant­asmagor­ic short Le chant de styrene. 

* Proof is in the pud­ding depart­ment: My Auteurs’ Notebook col­league David Phelps repor­ted from Cannes in May that at a press con­fer­ence there Resnais said that the film’s com­edy was inspired by Curb Your Enthusiasm, and, indeed, a bit involving a stuck zip­per could have been lif­ted dir­ectly from that series. 

* At the New York press con­fer­ence, sup­port­ing play­er Mathieu Amalric told us that he did his roles in Grass and the mal­ad­roit Bond film (or “doob-leh oh sev­en” movie, as he put it) Quantum of Solace at pretty much the same time. Which might explain why he uses the exact same crazy stare through­out both pic­tures.

* Comic appre­ci­ation corner: Another high­light of the Foundas inter­view is Resnais’ cita­tion of the great Milton Caniff. It made me so happy I very nearly brought one of my Terry And The Pirates reprint volumes to the NYFF party in the hope that I could get Resnais to sign it! Also, the col­or cod­ing of Grass, so aptly noted by Manohla Dargis in her most recent bit of praise for the film, reminded me of how much I wish, still, that Warren Beatty had got­ten Resnais to dir­ect Dick Tracy. 

* I note with a sigh of resig­na­tion that some of the film’s detractors—critics I like and respect—are respond­ing with the old bit about “not caring about” the film’s char­ac­ters. I won’t cite or link, since My Lovely Wife has noted that I’ve star­ted enough fights in recent months. But I will note that while I did not neces­sar­ily “care” about the film’s char­ac­ters, I did find them of interest, as they say…and (here’s where I start get­ting “do-I-have-to-spell-it-out-for-you” irrit­able…) that the film isn’t really inter­ested in estab­lish­ing a con­ven­tion­al kind of view­er empathy ANYWAY. And that I still find the whole top­ic too tedi­ous for words, and that I’ve dis­cussed exactly why, in a fair num­ber of words non­ethe­less, here and here, if you’re interested.

I see in the Village Voice that the film has found a new detract­or in the bril­liant and indefatig­able J. Hoberman, who dip­lo­mat­ic­ally allows that he does­n’t see what the film’s admirers see in what he finds “an insuf­fer­able exer­cise in cutie-pie mod­ern­ism, pain­fully unfunny and pre­cious to a fault.” He later acknow­ledges Resnais’ form­al chops, allow­ing that the film’s “skill­ful integ­ra­tion of high angles, slow motion, and mega-closeups” make it pos­sible to watch the film “as and exercise—but only up to a point.” And he’s really annoyed by Sabine Azema and her kooky hairdo. As you might expect, Hoberman’s pan is one of the more cogent and poten­tially per­suas­ive ones. I allow that it’s entirely pos­sible that view­ers of a cer­tain dis­pos­i­tion might be more irrit­ated than engaged by what they take as the film’s air of cos­mic frivolity. (Or cutie-pie mod­ern­ism, if you will.) That, as they say, is what makes a horse race. Armond White, for instance, loves the pic­ture. And talk about see­ing dif­fer­ent things in it. Here’s Hoberman: “When [Azema] […] appeared in a tailored march­ing jack­et, I enter­tained myself by men­tally cast­ing her as a passé British rock­er, a degen­er­ate dandy debauch­ing her way to the Greek.” And White: “A droll touch: Marguerite’s wild red hair and full-length uni­form resemble Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince.”