[Editor's Note: Wild Grass opens Fri., Aug 13 at Muvico Baywalk in St. Pete and Centro Ybor in Tampa.]
Wild Grass, the latest from director Alain Resnais’ (Last Year at Merienbad, Hiroshima Mon Amour), has elicited some passionate debate among critics and cinephiles. Some see the film as a return to form for the veteran director to his experimental glory days of the 1960s; other just find the film's aggressive strangeness irritating. But this is a polarization of the best kind for a film, because it means no one has seen any thing quite like it before. I imagine Kubrick’s 2001 received a similar critical reaction the year it came out.
This surreal and almost incomprehensible tale is at once a love story, a stalker film, a sex farce, a spoof, and even a parable about life and death. There’s also the possibility of some sci-fi crammed in there too. Wild Grass' tone shifts from one extreme to the other, but in a way that feels almost natural. And the film never feels random, because the filmmaking is so skillful and deliberate.
This article appears in Aug 5-11, 2010.