A bizarre, captivating story of stalking

During the opening credits of Wild Grass, a bizarre and stubbornly entertaining film from octogenarian French filmmaker Alain Resnais, the camera glides over a stretch of broken pavement where grass grows in the cracks.

This image of nature defying human order proves to be an apt metaphor for Resnais' movie about a troubled and troublesome man who does the same.

The apparent crackpot is one Georges Palet (André Dussolier), an unpredictable married man of around 60. Georges stalks Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azéma), a dentist-by-weekday, aviatrix-by-weekend whose wallet he finds in a parking garage. Like Marguerite's vocation and her avocation, the movie is both mundane and transcendent.

At first it isn't clear whether the film that unfolds is a thriller, romance, or mystery. As it happens, it is all of the above. Like Georges, its tone shifts abruptly and often.

At no time is it firm as to whether Georges is mad, a victim of mad love, or a mad fantasist who shares his daydreams and nightmares. As it happens, he may be all of the above. (They are not mutually exclusive.)

From its opening, where Marguerite (face unseen) tries on shoes like Cinderella, to a closing sequence that shares some affinities with The Little Prince, the film has a storybook look and saturated primary colors.

It would appear that Georges, who finds Marguerite's apple-red wallet discarded by a thief who has stolen her banana-yellow handbag, is both Curious George(s) and the Big Bad Wolf caught up in Fatal Attraction.

Rather than indulge his fantasy of returning the wallet and meeting his dream woman, Georges takes the item to the police precinct, where he's worried about being recognized from a prior (unspecified) crime. When Marguerite calls Georges to thank him, he starts stalking her. Then, when he is restrained from doing so, she starts stalking him.

The weird magnetism between the characters - Marguerite's innocence and Georges' worldliness - plays out in unexpected ways, with the rich color, swoopy camerawork, and jazzy music having a mesmerizing effect.

If there is a moral or takeaway message here, then perhaps it is that of the Little Prince: We see not with our eyes but with our hearts.