After a period of stage adaptations, Alain Resnais adapts his first novel, The Incident by Christian Gailly, with a palpable feeling of liberation. Even though his theater pieces were never less than fluid, there was necessarily a more restricted range and velocity in the flow. Here he can show off a playfulness, a friskiness, a nimbleness, that we have not seen from him lately or perhaps ever (he would have been eighty-six when he was making it), with a packed arsenal of dynamic pans, tracks, zooms, and, most tellingly, overhead shots that invite us to view the human figures from the same perspective as the opening shots view the titular wild grass, weedy growths sprouting randomly through cracks in the asphalt at our feet. This central and recurring image — the wild, the random, the unruly grass — is a symbol as pregnant, poetic, succinct, and comprehensible as, say, the drifting snowflakes in Love unto Death, the sky-reaching tree at the end of Life Is a Bed of Roses, the manicured gardens and marble halls of Marienbad. The fluky storyline registers as immediately gripping and gradually loosening, the “wildness” of the characters wilder than it needed to be to make the point: a snatched purse; a found wallet; a desire on the part of the finder to see destiny at work, to make something momentous of the moment, to expect more than a mere thank-you when the wallet is returned to its owner (“You disappoint me”); a growing obsession; a contagion of lunacy; and a final twist of fate, a stuck zipper in the lavatory. Traces of Patricia Highsmith or Ruth Rendell can be detected in the way the situation develops (one of Highsmith’s lesser novels, Found in the Street, in fact begins with a found wallet), and the dark irrationality of the characters, the transfer of madness from the stalker to the stalked, will present no difficulty to fans of those authors, or for that matter fans of Resnais. Viewers who look for tidy “motivation” and “consistency” in their fictional characters will experience rougher waters. The film unfolds, furthermore, not with the oppressive ominousness of a thriller, nor with the bubbly optimism of a romantic comedy (it is often funny, but then so are the thrillers of Highsmith and Rendell), but instead with a tenor and tone sui generis, something uncertain and unconventional, something that could go either way, neither heavy nor light, serious and yet mischievous. André Dussollier, Sabine Azéma, Anne Consigny, Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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