Wild Grass (Les herbes folles - 2009)

This interesting and beautiful yarn about the aftermath of a purse-snatching won the Special Jury Prize and Special Award at Cannes and was nominated for its Palme d'Or. Directed by 88-year-old Alain Resnais, it stars his orange-haired paramour Sabine Azéma (61) and André Dussolier as the owner of the wallet and the one who finds it later, respectively. Dussolier (64 years old, he was in the excellent Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne - 2006), the narrator of Amélie (2001), and in Micmacs, among many others) is described by the policeman (Mathieu Amalric, star of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), and many other roles) as looking 50. Ha! He looks his real age. In an early scene, Jack and I thought Dussolier's character is getting together with his two daughters, one son-in-law, and one son. Turns out one "daughter" is supposed to be his wife of 30 years. Anne Consigny (A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël - 2008)), who plays his wife, is 47, but looks 40. Her real-life son, Vladimir Consigny, plays her son here. Emmanuelle Devos (star of the wonderful thriller Read My Lips (Sur mes lèvres - 2001), also was in A Christmas Tale, as well as a good part in Coco Before Chanel) is great as Azéma's work colleague. Resnais has been directing since 1936, and is best known for Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Mon oncle d'Amerique (1980), which I meant to see but didn't. Cinematographer Eric Gautier (Irma Vep (1996), The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), Into the Wild (2007), A Christmas Tale, Taking Woodstock, Summer Hours, and all the Assayas movies in the latter post) has fun with color, light, and mood under the direction of the old master.

A google search of "'wild grass' 'soundtrack jazz'" shows many writers criticizing the music (score by Mark Snow (composer of the X-Files theme) plus many songs) as banal, corny, flighty, weird, overemphatic. So shoot me, I liked it. Always nice to hear jazz on a soundtrack. I would have thought that the original French would be les herbes sauvages, for wild grass. Folles means crazy. That's more like the movie. There's a lot of craziness up on the screen. The average on rottentomatoes for the movie as a whole is 65%. I can't say that we loved this but it was well worth seeing nonetheless. Note to my long-time readers: Rule #2 has been broken.