We like whimsy as much as the next person, but 100 minutes of idle fancy may be more than most can take.

That's the deal with Wild Grass (Les Herbes Folles), a romance of sorts and an homage to the longevity of passion from revered French filmmaker Alain Resnais. It is heresy to criticize any aspect of the 88-year-old filmmaker's work, so let us say simply that Wild Grass is for his most devoted fans only.

Wild Grass unfolds like a fairy tale for adults, partly because an omniscient narrator (Edouard Baer) leads a viewer through the story. First we meet the lovely Marguerite (Sabine Azema), a woman with wild red hair who is enjoying the absolutely delicious pleasure of buying shoes. As she leaves the shop, her purse is stolen.

And here is Georges Palet (Andre Dussollier), an elegant older man with a certain Walter Mitty approach to life. He finds Marguerite's wallet where the thief has tossed it, and therein the seeds of romance are planted. He goes through her identification, looks at her picture, imagines things about her. So begins a conversation, mostly with himself, about who Marguerite might be and what her life might be like. He'll phone her. He'll return the wallet. Anything could happen.

Georges has a beautiful wife (Anne Consigny), which we learn when she phones him to talk about the children coming for dinner and the lawn. (The character of the wife is baffling and fascinating, especially in the way she speaks to Georges as if he were a child -- the world presented from his point of view, always.)

Georges next wanders over to the police station with the wallet, a comic and complicated sequence in which the lawn cutting comes up again while the police hold a noisy celebration. It's not too soon to start wondering where the heck the movie is going. And why.

When Marguerite phones Georges at home to thank him for finding her wallet, Georges' yearning increases -- as does his life of the imagination. Wild Grass mixes fact and fantasy with abandon; visually, that often has charming results, but the narrative plays like an inside joke. Or life lived as if it were a movie.

And maybe that's it. In a scene that has Marguerite following Georges to the movies and waiting for her first glimpse of him, the viewer is reminded of the brief, magical consciousness that a film can inspire. To wit: "After the cinema, nothing surprises you. Anything can happen."

So maybe the slow dance toward each other undertaken by Georges and Marguerite, with all the obsession and apparent silliness it entails, is a simple nod to the madness of love, movie-style. The film is loosely based on L'incident by Christian Gailly; it's in French, with English subtitles.

(This film is rated PG)

liz.braun@sunmedia.ca
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