The 88-year-old Alain Resnais’s latest film, WILD GRASS, shows him remaining true, all these decades later, to the principles of the French “Nouvelle Vague” of which he was a leading proponent:  anarchy, whimsy, visual antics, nonlinear and nonsensical story lines, abrupt endings, randomness and deliberate artifice. Although many of these devices, so revolutionary in their time, have now become part of mainstream film vocabulary, in Resnais’s hands they are played full-force, making his work unlike anything else made today.

It’s hard, or at least feels beside the point, to give a plot summary of a movie in which plot—which is also to say, any ethical underpinning—matters for little. Suffice it to say a lost wallet incites a meeting between the world’s least likely dentist, the wildly flame-haired Marguerite (the elegant Sabine Azéma, Resnais’s muse and companion in real life) and the dour,  possibly homicidal and unemployed but somehow wealthy Georges (André Dussollier), whose yellow chickie fluff hair somehow makes his deeply lined and frowning face appear even more sinister.

Aided by a deeply humanistic policeman (Mathiu Almaric, in my favorite performance in the movie), the two connect and reconnect in a wobbly spiral of obsession, fantasy, and counter-transference.

It takes a lot to make me sympathize with  arms dealers, especially the ruthless and pure evil ones, but Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s relentlessly whimsical and quirky Micmacs very nearly succeeds. The movie opens promisingly enough, with a beautifully shot (by Tetsuo Nagata) prologue high in style and speed. As a child Bazil is effectively orphaned when his soldier father is killed in war and his mother driven mad by grief.

The bad luck continues for the adult Bazil (played by Dany Boon), when a stray bullet plants itself in his forehead in such a way as to be unremoveable. Bazil subsequently loses job and home and falls into a quaint period of homelessness that is a loving homage to Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, and acts, in retrospect, almost as an idyll before the high energy escapades to come.

The idyll comes to an end when Bazil is adopted into a motley “family” of strenuously eccentric misfits, a veritable Coney Island freak show of oddball skills and personalities who live peaceably in one of those hyper-elaborate Mad Max/Matrix/Terry Gilliamesque junkyard baroque / steampunk fantasias. It looks exactly as  though it was created over many months of hard labor by an army of movie set dressers, and no doubt was.

Soon enough Bazil learns that the land mine that killed his father and the bullet that shattered his head were produced by rival arms manufacturers whose gothic headquarters—holy cinematic coincidence!—just happen to be located across the street from each other. Thus he and the rest of the Micmac family—having, apparently, absolutely nothing else to do with their days but invent wind-up Rube Goldberg toys from junkyard bits and pieces—embark on a shaggy dog campaign of revenge… and this time, it’s personal.