frenchnewwave

Les herbes folles (Wild Grass)

by James McNally on September 13, 2009 · 1 comment

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Les herbes folles (Wild Grass)

Les herbes folles (Wild Grass) (Director: Alain Resnais): Well, it’s often true that there’s one film each year that I abso­lutely hate. Who knew it would be this gen­er­ally well-reviewed film from renowned Nouvelle Vague dir­ector Alain Resnais? Well, I might have known, actu­ally. I’ve never liked Hiroshima Mon Amour and I can’t even look at stills from Last Year at Marienbad without smirking, but the post-Cannes reports all indic­ated that Les herbes folles was a light and airy con­fec­tion, romantic and sweet. Let’s just say I didn’t find that to be the case.

Georges Palet (André Dussollier) has been mar­ried for 30 years to the drop-dead sexy Suzanne (Anne Consigny). Yet inex­plic­ably, after he finds a wallet belonging to a woman named Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azema, Resnais’ girl­friend), he becomes obsessed with her, par­tially based on the pilot’s licence he finds there. Georges’ boy­hood dreams of flight have never come to pass, but he quickly becomes obsessed with con­tacting this woman. In fact, after some very stalker-like beha­viour, she asks the police to pay him a visit to warn him to stay away from her. Only after he com­plies, she begins to pursue him. It may be meant as playful but it comes across as wholly unreal. In fact, much of the film feels like it’s taking place on a very arti­fi­cial stage.

While the camera work is dazzling and Resnais still shows his playful side at the age of 87, by the halfway point the whole thing became annoying to me. The acting becomes more and more hys­ter­ical, and when Marguerite’s char­acter, a dentist, begins hurting her patients with the drill, it felt like an apt meta­phor for what the audi­ence was going through. My beef with Resnais is that he seems to be non­sensical on pur­pose, trying to ali­enate the audi­ence. By the end, he’s using too many tricks, and the unreality of the whole enter­prise just ended up leaving me cold to the char­ac­ters. He’d already lost me well before the end, but the truly bizarre con­clu­sion to the film left many in the audi­ence mur­muring in confusion.

5/10(5/10)

Tagged as: #tiff09, france, frenchnewwave

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Breathless (À bout de souffle)

by James McNally on August 5, 2004

in Critics,DVD

Breathless (À bout de souffle)

Brooke and I saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (À bout de souffle) (1960) the other night. It was my first time seeing it, though Brooke has seen it sev­eral times before, and says it’s one of her favourite films. Frankly, I had mixed feel­ings (though I gave it an 8 on IMDB). Some people can imme­di­ately dis­sect a film into its parts and can expound at length on the editing, the cine­ma­to­graphy, the sound design, and lots of other “tech­nical” aspects of the movie. I’ve never been able to do that, at least not upon my first viewing. I guess I have to ingest the whole before I can talk about any of the parts. And for me, the whole was some­what unsat­is­fying, even disturbing.

I tried to dis­tance myself from the obvious charms of the movie: Paris in the Sixties, exciting “French New Wave” flour­ishes like jump-cuts, the gor­geous Jean Seberg. And what I found was a film about two people with no souls. Michel and Patricia are com­pletely amoral and aim­less, and I could find no sym­pathy for them. This always makes watching a film dif­fi­cult for me. And even though Brooke grudgingly agreed with me, it was still clear that she loves the film and I, well, not so much.

I was strug­gling to figure out whether it was just me being con­trary, so I grabbed Pauline Kael’s book For Keeps off our book­shelf. Imagine my relief when I read:

“What sneaks up on you in Breathless is that the enga­gingly coy young hood with his loose, random grace and the imper­vious, pass­ively butch American girl are as shallow and empty as the shiny young faces you see in sports cars and in sub­urban super­mar­kets, and in news­pa­pers after unmo­tiv­ated, point­less crimes. And you’re left with the hor­rible sus­pi­cion that this is a new race, bred in chaos, accepting chaos as nat­ural, and not caring one way or another about it or any­thing else…The char­ac­ters in Breathless are casual, care­free moral idiots.”

I think seeing the film for the first time at the age of 39 has a lot to do with it. If I’d seen it twenty years ago, I may not have sus­pected that the char­ac­ters are pos­eurs, that even the film­maker may be a bit of a poseur. I might have mis­taken their chilling soul­less­ness for “cool” and tried to imitate it.

When I see Breathless again (and I think it is worthy of another viewing), I cer­tainly will pay more atten­tion to the revolu­tionary cam­er­a­work and editing. With the moral vacuum at the heart of the film now recog­nized and named, that seems to be the only place left I’d want to look.

Tagged as: Critics, DVD, france, frenchnewwave, godard, paulinekael

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