A tale that begins with feet ends up in the air – in all senses. A dizzy dentist (Sabine Azema) has her yellow handbag stolen. Her red purse is found by a seemingly mellow but potentially disturbed gentleman (Andre Dussollier) who becomes obsessed with the purse’s owner. Beginning rather like Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (its expressive use of colour) and then swerving into a Marienbad parody (insistent male trying to break down and dominate resistant female), the film actually proceeds to confound all narrative expectations, with the wild grass of the title becoming a metaphor for stories and personalities that can sprout and veer off in wholly unexpected directions. Here Resnais is rejoicing in the random and inexplicable elements of existence. As he observed at the film’s triumphant showing at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009: ‘The pages of life turn themselves, even if we like to think we do the turning.’ This is a wholly exhilarating entertainment from the cinema’s coolest octogenarian
post-modernist.