Wild Grass (Les Herbes Folles) (2009)
Average Rating: 6.2/10
Reviews Counted: 83
Fresh: 55 | Rotten: 28
Precious to a fault, Wild Grass finds 88-year-old director Alain Resnais as joyously unconstrained as ever.
Average Rating: 6.3/10
Critic Reviews: 27
Fresh: 19 | Rotten: 8
Precious to a fault, Wild Grass finds 88-year-old director Alain Resnais as joyously unconstrained as ever.
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Average Rating: 2.8/5
User Ratings: 1,397
Movie Info
Alain Resnais, one of the towering figures of the French New Wave, demonstrates he still has plenty to say in this drama based on a novel by Christian Gailly. Marguerite (Sabine Azéma) is a successful dentist with a busy practice and an offbeat hobby, flying small airplanes. One day, while running errands, Marguerite loses her wallet, and it's found by Georges (André Dussollier), a seemingly happy man with a wife, Suzanne (Anne Consigny), and two children (Vladimir Consigny and Sara Forestier).
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Cast
-
Sabine Azéma
Marguerite Muir -
André Dussollier
Georges Palet -
Anne Consigny
Suzanne -
Emmanuelle Devos
Josépha, Josépha, Jos?... -
Mathieu Amalric
Bernard de Bordeaux -
Michel Vuillermoz
Lucien d'Orange -
Edouard Baer
Narrator -
Annie Cordy
Neighbor -
Sara Forestier
Elodie -
Nicolas Duvauchelle
Jean-Mi -
Vladimir Consigny
Marcelin Palet -
Dominique Rozan
Sikorsky -
Jean-Noël Brouté
Mickey -
Elric Covarel-Garcia
Marguerite's Acolyte -
Valéry Schatz
Marguerite's Acolyte -
Stéfan Godin
Marguerite's Acolyte -
Grégory Perrin
Marguerite's Acolyte -
Roger Pierre
Marcel Schwer -
Paul Crauchet
Dental Office Patient -
Jean-Michel Ribes
Dental Office Patient -
Nathalie Kanoui
Dental Office Patient -
Adeline Ishiomin
Dental Office Patient -
Lisbeth Arazi Mornet
Dental Office Patient -
Francoise Gillard
Shoe Saleslady -
Magaly Godenaire
Watch Saleslady -
Rosine Cadoret
Cinema Ticket Saleslady -
Vincent Rivard
Bartender -
Dorothée Blank
Airline Passenger -
Antonin Mineo
Airline Passenger -
Emilie Jeauffroy
Airline Passenger -
Patrick Mimoun
Jean-Baptiste Larmeur -
Isabelle des Courtils
Madame Larmeur -
Candice Charles
Elodie Larmeur
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All Critics (83) | Top Critics (27) | Fresh (55) | Rotten (28) | DVD (1)
Alain Resnais keeps sprouting marvelous artistic herbage at an age when most of his contemporaries are pushing up grass from a different perspective.
Top CriticAt age 88, Resnais hasn't lost his capacity to confound.
What can you say: The French sure know how to make pretty pictures.
Wild Grass might be the strangest film I've seen all year. Maybe all millennium. Is it any good? Quite frankly, I have no idea.
Along with such fantasy elements as rich, primary colors and an ending that suggests we've jumped to some other cinematic dimension, Wild Grass, like compulsive filmmaking, embraces the intensity of subjective experience...
At 88, the legendary French director Alain Resnais has earned the right to make whatever movie he wants, even a smug deconstructionist parlor game like Wild Grass. Thankfully, this doesn't require you to watch it.
A confounding psychodrama that made me laugh in the scenes that were meant to be serious and remain mute in the scenes that were meant to be amusing.
Resnais is having fun here, possibly at the expense of audiences who demand tradition.
... a delightful reminder of the romantic streak and cinematic whimsy still in this 88-year-old cinema elder.
Director Alain Resnais? roundabout romance about missed connections and misplaced intentions is gorgeous to watch but difficult to track.
I recognize the Resnais I love in this movie, poking through here and there, a fumble-fingered god experimenting with his creation: a wobbly, lopsided world warmed by its maker's affection.
Wild Grass is about the randomness of life, and how the meaning behind arbitrary events is incomprehensible and opaque. This also describes what the experience of watching the film is like.
Wild Grass is the vision of Alain Resnais. He suggests that anything can happen in movies. Or in our imaginations.
Resnais' funky, frothy bonbon of a film is nevertheless a breathtaking sight to see.
Wild Grass is nearly the same movie as Amelie, only minus the charm and the appeal.
Wild Grass is a mess, and not in a particularly compelling way.
Camera movements, graphic matches, and strange tonal balances carry a lot of expressive weight in this story about chance encounters, creepy follow-ups, and abrupt changes of heart.
Required viewing only for anybody writing a doctoral thesis on Resnais...
A fanciful exercise in aesthetic and intellectual masturbation?
These are not likable characters, or even ones who seem to have regular contact with Planet Earth.
Resnais is as restlessly, impishly experimental as ever.
Resnais gives us the occasional delightful dose of whimsy -- yet since so many events are sheer nonsense, the initial delight devolves into a slog.
Audience Reviews for Wild Grass (Les Herbes Folles)
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Movie: ID: 770816905 Title: Wild Grass (Les Herbes Folles) Release Date: 2010-06-25 00:00:00.0 MPAA: 2 Status: 1
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Foreign Titles
- Vorsicht Sehnsucht (DE)
- Les herbes folles (FR)
If this is the French New Wave, then I should start watching the Old Wave. In Wild Grass there is so little attention paid to good exposition that I found myself lost, wondering about the characters' relationships to each other even after the first act was a memory. And the performance by Andre Dussolier does little to reveal his character's motivations. Performances like these are good when the story is clear and solid, but Resnais's concentration is on that which is unclear, so the sum is a character who behaves strangely but whose motivations for his strangeness remain a mystery, unconnected to the random shots of weeds. And when he yells and snaps in a romantic story we wonder what the whole point is.
Overall, there are people who find this absurdist alienation interesting and refreshing, but I'm not one of them.