(2009; Les herbes folles, French) Anything can happen after going to the cinema, sort of like a dream. An adaptation of Christian Gailly's novel, L'incident, the screenplay co-written with Laurent Herbiet, French New Wave director Alain Resnais in his seventh decade of filmmaking gives his crazily romantic movie two endings, a choice between comedy and tragedy.

The weeds begin in the cracks of pavement, flourishing in the fields; the camera focuses on people's feet before gradually, by the conclusion, rising into the atmosphere. In Paris to purchase a new pair of shoes, Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azéma), a dentist with a crown of crimson curls, is robbed of her handbag, leaving her sou-less so that she must return the shoes for a refund. A cold bath first, she decides to wait until the following day to report her loss to the police.

In a parking garage beneath a shopping mall after having a battery replaced in his wristwatch, Georges Palet (André Dussollier) discovers a red wallet, inside of which he finds Marguerite's identification and two photos of her, one with "a hint of sadness" and the other a pilot's license with a pretty smile. (Her face puts him in mind of Hélène Boucher, an aviatrix who died while performing acrobatic air stunts in the '30s.)

As two young girls pass him, one in white pants with her black panties visible, the fiftyish man feels an impulse to ravish them as well as kill them. First fantasizing of a phone conversation with Marguerite as he drives home, he later attempts to call her, the ringing unanswered as an airplane drones overhead.

His attractive wife of 30 years, Suzanne (Anne Consigny), calls with a request that he cut the grass. Dislocating his shoulder mowing the lawn, he waits until the following day to report the missing wallet to the police (where he's hesitant and fearful of being recognized for something related to his past), leaving an impression with Officer Bernard of his being "an odd fellow" apparently aged by "a big problem."

During a dinner party with Suzanne, hosting their daughter Elodie and her husband and their unmarried late-arriving son Marcelin, Georges receives a call from Marguerite, thanking him - but nothing more. "You disappoint me," he says harshly. Ashamed of his conduct over the phone, he goes to her apartment and leaves a letter of apology, which he immediately regrets.

After Marguerite reads the missive and briefly replies, he sets down an autobiographical account of himself - believing makes life real, or life makes believing come true - as a motorcycle mechanic with an old passion of always wanting to fly; receiving no further response, he leaves messages on her answering machine, until one evening she picks up the phone: "Leave me alone."

When she finds the tires on her car slashed with his note affixed to the windshield, she requests Bernard's help, without pressing charges, to end the harassment ("He's demanding to see me") from a "brutish suitor"; Bernard and another officer visit Georges, whose anxiety results in his becoming exceedingly gregarious, to gently warn him that he must desist before he does something really stupid.

Marguerite telephones to speak with Georges late at night, only to reach Suzanne, who says her husband's at the cinema. She waits for him to come out from watching the 1954 Korean-war movie The Bridges at Toko-Ri (starring William Holden and Grace Kelly), though she's never seen him before.

Too long grounded, the female pilot loses touch with her patients (causing them pain under a drill in the dentist chair), abandoning them to her professional partner and friend Dr Josepha Belotch (Emmanuelle Devos) while she becomes obsessed with Georges: If there can be worry without love, can there be love without worry?

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Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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