A stalker story where reality quickly takes a tumble down a slippery slope, Alain Resnais's take on Christian Gailly's novel (L'Incident) -- about a man who decides that the finding of a woman's lost pocketbook entitles him to some form of romantic connection -- plays a risky game, one that it loses in the end.
Andre Dussollier, playing his role with a Michael Caine-ish level of resentment and reserve, is Georges Palet, a married man of means whose mental foundation seems already somewhat shaky by the time he comes across the pocketbook in question. Georges's son-in-law is nervous about how to address the distant older man, who seems content only with his books and childlike love of airplanes. His younger wife, Suzanne (Anne Consigny, the muse in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) treats him with a diffidence that's almost like that of a daughter treading nervously around a volatile parent. She praises Georges for doing the slightest thing around their beautiful and bookish old house, all charming alcoves and gorgeous garden views, seeming hardly to notice when he turns into a raving lunatic under her nose.
The incident that sets Georges over the edge starts the film. A bumptious narration sets the scene for when a dentist, Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azema), goes shoe shopping for her curiously-sized feet. Leaving the store, she's robbed of her purse and has to shamefacedly go back to the store to return the shoes. All we see of her at first is a nimbus of fiery red frizz from behind. Even later, her face is frequently obscured behind her white surgical mask or later on when she puts on goggles for flying a plane (she's an amateur pilot). We see more of her later after Georges finds her pocketbook and begins calling her and coming by the apartment, alternately declaring his love for and disappointment in her. Mash notes and slashed tires, as these things tend to go. Strangely enough, Marguerite responds to some of his entreaties just as he begins to pull away in a stew of contradictory, self-destructive impulses.
There's something in Resnais's entranced attitude toward this off-key woman and her explosively eclectic lifestyle (bright yellow sports car, radically over-decorated apartment, the sideline as an amateur pilot) that recalls Pedro Almodovar: think of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown's Julieta Serrano on the motorcycle flying through the streets of Madrid, hair flying in the wind. Georges's attitude toward her is more complicated. When he first delivers her pocketbook to the local police (Mathieu Amalric, wringing as much comedy out of the confusion as possible), Georges can barely decide whether he's coming or going, to turn it in or not. Similarly he can't decide if the woman in the photograph is the one of his dreams or the last woman on earth he wants to see. When Marguerite turns the tables, following him out of a movie theater and asking him for a drink, his neurotic stasis puts him in near mental lockdown.
It's no surprise that Resnais's story has a decreasingly strong grip on the real world as it goes -- he's never been a filmmaker who had too much reverence for A-then-B storytelling. The music veers from sappy 1980s movie-jazz to a mechanical-sounding thriller-trance score, just as the story's mood slips from intense psychodrama to clowning dream. The filmmaker's visual sense never wavers, though, locking in a number of delectably framed scenes whose stark beauty almost make up for a loose-limbed and frustrating story, too much of which hinges on a hackneyed plot that doesn't do these actors much justice.
aka Les herbes folles
Andre Dussollier, playing his role with a Michael Caine-ish level of resentment and reserve, is Georges Palet, a married man of means whose mental foundation seems already somewhat shaky by the time he comes across the pocketbook in question. Georges's son-in-law is nervous about how to address the distant older man, who seems content only with his books and childlike love of airplanes. His younger wife, Suzanne (Anne Consigny, the muse in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) treats him with a diffidence that's almost like that of a daughter treading nervously around a volatile parent. She praises Georges for doing the slightest thing around their beautiful and bookish old house, all charming alcoves and gorgeous garden views, seeming hardly to notice when he turns into a raving lunatic under her nose.
The incident that sets Georges over the edge starts the film. A bumptious narration sets the scene for when a dentist, Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azema), goes shoe shopping for her curiously-sized feet. Leaving the store, she's robbed of her purse and has to shamefacedly go back to the store to return the shoes. All we see of her at first is a nimbus of fiery red frizz from behind. Even later, her face is frequently obscured behind her white surgical mask or later on when she puts on goggles for flying a plane (she's an amateur pilot). We see more of her later after Georges finds her pocketbook and begins calling her and coming by the apartment, alternately declaring his love for and disappointment in her. Mash notes and slashed tires, as these things tend to go. Strangely enough, Marguerite responds to some of his entreaties just as he begins to pull away in a stew of contradictory, self-destructive impulses.
There's something in Resnais's entranced attitude toward this off-key woman and her explosively eclectic lifestyle (bright yellow sports car, radically over-decorated apartment, the sideline as an amateur pilot) that recalls Pedro Almodovar: think of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown's Julieta Serrano on the motorcycle flying through the streets of Madrid, hair flying in the wind. Georges's attitude toward her is more complicated. When he first delivers her pocketbook to the local police (Mathieu Amalric, wringing as much comedy out of the confusion as possible), Georges can barely decide whether he's coming or going, to turn it in or not. Similarly he can't decide if the woman in the photograph is the one of his dreams or the last woman on earth he wants to see. When Marguerite turns the tables, following him out of a movie theater and asking him for a drink, his neurotic stasis puts him in near mental lockdown.
It's no surprise that Resnais's story has a decreasingly strong grip on the real world as it goes -- he's never been a filmmaker who had too much reverence for A-then-B storytelling. The music veers from sappy 1980s movie-jazz to a mechanical-sounding thriller-trance score, just as the story's mood slips from intense psychodrama to clowning dream. The filmmaker's visual sense never wavers, though, locking in a number of delectably framed scenes whose stark beauty almost make up for a loose-limbed and frustrating story, too much of which hinges on a hackneyed plot that doesn't do these actors much justice.
aka Les herbes folles
