CANNES: Alain Resnais, they keep reminding us, is 87 years old and still working. That would be astonishing if he were an astronaut repairing orbiting spacecraft or a champion triathlete, but film directing is a profession in which, physical strength and mental acuity permitting, longevity needn\'t be a minus and can be a plus.
A plus because if you\'re going to accrue wisdom and craft, it\'s reasonable to assume you\'ll have a good supply of both by now. And a plus because if you\'re still truly interested in making movies at that age, it\'s probably because you have a story to tell.
As the saying goes, Resnais is \"all there\" and then some. After a career of working from screenplays written directly for the screen or adapted from plays, Wild Grass is his first film to be adapted from a book – in this case, L\'Incident by Christian Gailly, one of his 13 novels to date.
The \"incident\" in question is the theft of a woman\'s wallet.
Although the film is extremely visual, it is also talky enough to be enjoyable to a moviegoer who can\'t see. For, in keeping with its literary source material and its theme of inner questioning, we are treated to voiceover narration galore. Not the \"Oh, no – can\'t they just SHOW us instead of gabbing about it\" variety but a deft, wry, absolutely complementary form of narration that gives the rather slight tale much of its narrative oomph. The wide-ranging and never obtrusive musical score echoes the \"solo riff\" quality of the spoken dialogue.
There is an omniscient narrator, voiced by Edouard Baer, and there is narration aplenty from the central protagonists, Georges Palet (André Dussolier) and Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azema).
Marguerite, a dentist, drives a flashy sports car and splurges on fancy footwear. Georges, a retired fellow of a certain age, lives in a comfortable suburban villa with his wife of 30 years and yearns for his brain to remain calm and uncluttered.
But when he finds a wallet and sees the photos of its owner on the ID papers within, his brain is off and running, doing obsessive pirouettes of speculation.
This is the second film in this year\'s Cannes competition in which the inner voice of a character or characters is given visible form. In Ken Loach\'s bittersweet comedy Looking for Eric, a Manchester postman who idolizes French football lelegend Eric Cantona, suddenly finds himself having lengthy conversations with Cantona in person, a sort of guardian angel who plays verbal ping pong with the troubled main character. In Wild Grass, characters practice phone calls they\'re going to make and things they\'re thinking of saying only to find the human object of their internal speculation hovering in the same frame like a large cameo pin.
Like the scruffy but valiant vegetation of the title, Georges and Marguerite find themselves pushing up through the emotional equivalent of cracks in society\'s concrete sidewalks and paved roads, reaching for the light and the sky.
Georges\' wife (Anne Consigny) reacts to her spouse\'s latest obsessive flirtation as only French women seem to (or French women in books and movies, anyway.) Marguerite\'s fellow dentist and friend (Emmanuelle Devos) humors Marguerite and in a certain way, has the last laugh.
These characters live in the sort of posh suburbs where the police apparently never have to deal with anything more serious than crimes of the heart. Or misdemeanors of the heart. Or parking tickets or littering citations of the heart.
From pointed conversation and jagged emotions, Resnais has crafted a silly but convincing movie courtship that boldly celebrates the conventions of movie romance.
