Late flourishes: "Wild Grass"

Wild Grass, the latest film from Alain Resnais, opens with an extended, lingering sequence of shoe shopping that suggests the veteran French director has either been concealing a foot fetish all these years, or has become a late-in-life convert to Sex and the City. Emerging from the chicest, not to mention most accommodating Marc Jacobs boutique en tout Paris, red-headed aviatrix Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azema) has her bag snatched by a passing skateboarder, and rather than report this theft to the police, she elects to let it go, inadvertently kickstarting the most haphazard plot of this, or any other, movie year.

Marguerite's monogrammed purse ends up under the front wheel of a car belonging to married oddball Georges Palet (Jacques Dussolier), whose first response, upon finding it, is to umm and ahh and generally wonder what on earth he should do with this artefact. When these two finally cross paths, they find they can't stop thinking about one another; and matters aren't helped by the fact their movements are being recounted by the film's entirely unreliable narrator (Edouard Baer), who scarcely seems sure himself what to make of this story, or how it's going to work out - a modernist uncertainty principle, cineastes will note, of a kind the Resnais of old delighted in.

You go to Wild Grass to hear a yarn being spun with all of the director's usual fluency and dexterity: it's a divertissement made up of a thousand tiny divertissements, a series of random events that keep changing the course of the lead characters' fate, right through to the film's confounding (and yet somehow perfectly apt) finale. These will include: the slashing of a smart car's tyres; the purchase of a WWII Spitfire; a revival of the 1954 feature The Bridges at Toko-Ri; and the ever-welcome involvement of Arnaud Desplechin regulars Mathieu Amalric and Emmanuelle Devos as professionals - a gendarme and a dentist, respectively - who have the misfortune to find themselves caught between two tres scatty protagonists. (The denouement, meanwhile, will involve a major catastrophe brought about by nothing so minor as a malfunctioning zip: less butterfly than trouser-fly effect, you might say.)

Like Baer's narrator, we simply never know what shape Wild Grass is going to take until it's over, and even then, we may not be entirely sure what it is we've just witnessed. At times, with Marguerite and Georges on screen, it plays like an off-kilter romance; at others, particularly when Devos's dentist comes to the fore, we could be watching a Marathon Man-style psychothriller. Resnais' preceding films - the run of Ayckbourn adaptations and musical pastiches began by 1993's Smoking/No Smoking - were marked by a certain cosiness: they knew exactly their audience, and went after them accordingly. There's nothing in Wild Grass to upset the core constituency unduly, but it displays far greater urgency and mystery - a playful score by The X-Files' Mark Snow helps - and a desire to subvert viewer expectation with each fresh new turn.

It may be the pressures of domestic life - the need to repaint the shingles and mow the lawn - that has led Dussolier's "type bizarre" to such erratic behaviour; if Wild Grass wasn't so theatrical in the now-familiar Resnais style - prefab locations and wildly stylised lighting predominate - we could be watching a Chabrol suspenser, premised on the suffocating properties of bourgeois life. (At one point, Palet tells the tale of a married neighbour with two young children who, having been laid off at work, returned home to blow his brains out - a very Chabrolian state of affairs.)

The variation in tone would be as bewildering as anything in Last Year at Marienbad or Muriel, if Resnais didn't set such faith in actors we're wholly prepared to follow from scene to scene, the better to see where all this is heading. The film stands on Dussolier's remarkable ability to synthesise funny-ha-ha and funny-strange, to do sinister and bumbling in the space of the same sequence; I spent much of the movie convinced Georges Palet would be exposed as a murderer, and that the corpse would turn up in one of the fields of grass Resnais' camera keeps cutting away to and sweeping over. (As it is, the character will be responsible for at least two deaths before the end credits roll, though - again - not in the manner one might expect.)

Meanwhile, Azema - the director's long-time partner, and acteur fetiche - is warm and sympathetically batty as a woman determined to guard her independence, her right to a long soak in the tub, from the men in her life, the tangled craziness breaking out around her, even her own wild Ronald McDonald-like mane. So scattershot and unpredictable are the signs and signifiers in Wild Grass that it may be the first film in history to take the majority of its cues from its heroine's hairstyle, but there the film is in a nut(ty) shell: daring, amusing, and - beyond a certain stage - quite gloriously out of control.

Wild Grass opens at selected cinemas from Friday.