Alain Resnais’s “Wild Grass,” Palme d’Or contender
Alain Resnais presents "Wild Grass" in Competition
It has been 29 long years since director Alain Resnais presented one of his films in Competition. However, with today’s screening of Wild Grass, his latest feature, served by a prestigious cast: André Dussollier, Sabine Azéma, Mathieu Amalric, and Emmanuelle Devos, Resnais, laureate of the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury in 1980 with Mon Oncle d’Amérique puts an end to his long absence from the Official Selection. In this "film choral" based on Christian Gailly’s novel L’Incident, Sabine Azéma romps around as Marguerite, a woman whose purse is snatched outside a store. Naturally, the thief takes the money and throws the rest away in a parking lot. Little did Georges (André Dussollier) know what Fate had in store for him, when he stooped down to pick it up…
Alain Resnais explains what attracted him to this particular piece of fiction: I sensed a syncopated and almost improvised side to the novel, a skill for the variation on "standards," in the musical sense. I was also struck by the stubbornness of Georges Palet and Marguerite Muir, the protagonists, who are incapable of resisting the desire to carry out irrational acts, who display incredible vitality in what we can look on as a headlong rush into confusion. L’Incident talks about "the desire for desire" which arises in Georges from nothing, before he even meets Marguerite or speaks to her on the phone, and that then feeds off itself."
Resnais chose the title Wild Grass because he associates it with "these characters who follow totally unreasonable impulses, like those seeds that make the most of cracks in the asphalt in the city or in a stone wall in the country to grow where no one is expecting them."
