Starring Sabine Azéma and André Dussollier. In French with English subtitles. Rating unavailable. Opens Friday, July 9, at the Ridge Theatre

The man whom Positif magazine recently described as the “greatest living French filmmaker” has shifted gears more than once. After revolutionizing the artistic documentary with such influential exercises as “Guernica”, Alain Resnais astonished the world with his breakthrough Holocaust short “Night and Fog”. After switching to fiction features in the late 1950s, his collaborations with celebrated “new novelists” Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet resulted in the masterpieces Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad. Resnais made movies that challenged everything from torture in Algeria to the lingering obscenity of Franco’s Spain.

Then he reconnected with his early love of light theatre, and over the past 25 years, his work has largely been absent from North American screens.

That’s why the opportunity to see Wild Grass, the third film at the Vancouver French Film Festival, is such a special treat. Starring his two favourite performers, spouse Sabine Azéma and usual leading man André Dussollier, Wild Grass describes what happens after Marguerite Muir (Azéma) has her purse snatched, only to be discovered by Georges Palet (Dussollier), a man whose true motivations, to put it mildly, remain a mystery. Although in many respects Wild Grass resembles a high-tech boulevard farce (possible conversational outcomes to potential encounters are photographed in “cameo” split screen to often hilarious effect), the film is really a profound meditation on the laws of motion-picture narration, a discourse in which conventional psychological explanations play little part.

Why is Marguerite both a dentist and a pilot? What does Georges do to people he really doesn’t like? And how should we interpret the film’s final mind-blowing sequences?

These are all questions you’ll have to answer for yourself.