Weed Out the Weak

WILD GRASS

Directed by Alain Resnais

Runtime: 113 min.

THE KILLER INSIDE ME

Directed by Michael Winterbottom

Runtime: 109 min. ALAIN RESNAIS WAS never a pop filmmaker. His “fun” always comes with an intellectual prerequisite that bespeaks class while also evaluating it. His experiments with narrative form are also a kind of emotional rigor and it often expands into glorious empathy, as in his latest film Wild Grass—although the title Les Herbes Folles suggests “Crazy Grass,” which accounts for the personal eccentricity that structures a relationship between Georges (Andre Sussolier), who finds a woman’s wallet, and the wallet’s owner, Marguerite (Sabine Azema). From the first close-up of images of weeds in fields and then in cracks of pavement, Resnais dissolves to people on the street. He surveys human behavior as parallels of nature. Every image and transition conveys a thought (as when Georges seeks out Marguerite’s apartment and assorted address numbers appear in progressive sequence). These visual kinetics describe Resnais’ elegant, gliding, tracking camera style. Since Mélo (1986), he has favored theatrical/cinematic contrivance—non-realism—where only actors/people, feelings and thoughts are foremost, distilling life to “incidents,” as in the title of Christian Gailly’s source novel.

Wild Grass relays each incident of Georges and Marguerite’s tentative flirtation through such exquisite refinement—an amazing 360-degree slo-mo pan around Marguerite somehow maintains her anomie—that it embarrasses just about every other piece of filmmaking around. Ironically, in fraudulent experimenter Michael Winterbottom’s ugly, ugly The Killer Inside Me, Bill Pullman plays a lawyer who quotes novelist Jim Thompson’s pithy, “A weed is just a plant out of place,” which turns out to echo Resnais’ central concept. Despite being well-heeled, Resnais’ characters suffer social alienation: the pleasures of childhood and escape trouble their adult consciousness. Both Georges and Marguerite yearn for aviation, admiring airplanes for being able to lift them from gravity, and Resnais ingeniously demonstrates how it inhabits their every thought, gesture, hesitation and observation. (A droll touch: Marguerite’s wild red hair and full-length uniform resemble Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince.)

This is greater than the facile existentialism in Winterbottom’s vicious film-noir pastiche, which leaks any surprise simply by casting mealy-mouthed, squeakyvoiced Casey Affleck as psychopathic Texas cop Lou Ford. Winterbottom’s emphasis on Ford’s sexual aberration—he keeps copies of Freud and Havelock Ellis in his library— feels deceitful when no interest is shown in the sexual history of other characters or his victims. Winterbottom is in Mike Figgis mode, offering grossly violent filmnoir clichés, made of punching-bag-face make-up, gratuitous sex and Dark Knight nihilism—a crude contrast to sophisticated Resnais, where sexual desire is as airy yet deep as peak Ernst Lubitsch.

As a contemporary of the French New Wave, Resnais continues to innovate cinema. Not as a winking hipster like Winterbottom but as an aesthetic philosopher. Wild Grass’ “plot” is more psychological, not random, and reaches its own peak of sophistication when Marguerite tracks Georges to a movie theater and in the red glow of the Cinema’s neon sign reveal their secret fears and desires. That this unforgettable moment is not at all realistic gives it extraordinary power. Twenty-first-century audiences might liken its artifice to Eyes Wide Shut, In the Mood for Love and even Inglourious Basterds, but Resnais now has greatness at his fingertips and reduces those films to nitrate dust.