Wild Grass

Wild Grass (2009) is a French drama to watch online on iFILM, directed by Alain Resnais at eighty-seven. It moves with the assured strangeness of someone who no longer owes the audience anything: playful, oblique, and oddly light for a story that circles obsession. André Dussollier plays Georges, a retired man with a murky past. Sabine Azéma is Marguerite, a dentist who flies small planes on weekends. Their story starts with a stolen purse.

A thief takes Marguerite's bag; Georges finds her wallet on the ground and picks it up. From there the film quietly refuses to behave. He doesn't return it right away — he holds it, reads her documents, grows oddly fixated on this woman he's never met. She gets the wallet back and finds herself equally curious about the stranger who found it. What follows is neither a romance nor its opposite: two people circling each other in a loop that's funny, unnerving, and deliberately unresolved.

Based on Christian Gailly's novel L'Incident, Wild Grass is Resnais at his most carefree — a pastel colour palette, a buoyant score, and the sense that cinema's rules are optional. With Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric in supporting roles. Stream Wild Grass online on iFILM.