Les herbes folles (2009)

Alain Renais completed his latest film, Les herbes folles (Wild Grass), in his 87th year, and it is, in my opinion, his best. The narrative event (based on L’incident by Christian Gailly) is simple; a woman, Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azéma), loses her purse to a purse snatcher, and George Palet (André Dussolier), a married man in his 50s, finds her billfold in a garage, attempts to return it, becomes obsessed with its owner, and pursues her, while she, who spurns him first, becomes obsessed with him and starts to pursue him.

The narrative is fluid in its continuity but disjunctive in its logic. Ultimately, we are not sure what incident in the story actually happened (if any) and if her obsession is also a fictive concoction in his obsessed mind. Like certain events from our childhood, which we seem to remember as something we actually did but may be in large part what we were told we did by parents and siblings and has become entangled in our memory. Fiction and reality do get confused if we lose our mind but, even when we are sane and sober, if we let our mind wander and float away on its own. This happens when we awaken suddenly from a drowsy stupor or when we daydream without constraint. Obsessions in these conditions grow adventitious and rampant. George goes to a police station to return the billfold; the scene is a bit absurd and not quite believable. Marguerite’s car tires were slashed; we don’t see the slashing but we see her believing that he did it. Yet it could well be that he imagined that she thought he did it. We are never sure. His fantasy spreads all over the place, like rhizomes -- like crabgrass that creeps and spreads -- as we see in an early shots of a paved walk. The English title Wild Grass is quite inadequate; the French fou/fol/folle means wild, foolish, and crazy all at the same time: rampant and adventitious.

We have seen films in which imagined events presented themselves obtrusively as reality in the works of Fellini, Buñuel, and Resnais himself. But whereas L’année derniére à Marienbad moves ethereally in poetic stream-of-onsciousness, Les herbes is more solidly anchored in seeming actuality. It is more resilient -- an ebullient joyride all the way on his flight of imagination.

The film audience today assumes that a film narrates an event, fictitious or real, in a realistic way, as an event that had happened as it happens in reality. This assumption goes all the way back to the presumed realistic nature of photography, that a camera captures the real world honestly and accurately. This has long been proven false, except for the witness role of the camera; the camera was at the site and recorded what occurred in front of it. In film history, this realistic bias was reinforced by Italian neorealism and then the New Wave, that rejected the artificiality of Hollywood classics and insisted on film’s documentary capacity. The audience, expecting the film to tell a straight narrative, is therefore easily confused. Many were befuddled to judge by the overheard conversations: “Whatever happened, I’d like to know,” “I couldn’t make head or tail of it,” “I lost it after ten minutes.”

As the director himself said in an interview (TimeOut NY, 769): “I often mix up what I remember and what’ actually real.” Thank goodness for that; we do, too, and love it.