87-year-old New Wave visionary Alain Resnais is most certainly not too old to be contemporary. Resnais’ most recent film “Wild Grass” is a triumph of style and cinematic innovation that proves he hasn’t lost his touch.

“Wild Grass” opens the 46th New York Film Festival tonight, and Resnais’s latest has clearly claimed the hearts of critics and festivals alike.

The film’s title derives from those displaced shoots of grass, which somehow manage to spring up amidst the concrete – in between the sidewalk cracks and areas that haven’t seen greenery in years. Resnais makes this point crystal clear in his cinematography, though the depth lies in how true this is of his characters – they themselves are displaced, where they shouldn’t be. Both protagonists are lost in a world they are a physical part of but strangely don’t belong in.

The weakness of the film, if any, lies in the treatment of the narrative — Resnais seems to let the stylistic devices and colors of the film speak for his characters’ emotions, rather than the acting. The plot itself surrounds Marguerite  (Sabine Azema) and Georges (Andre Dussollier), two middle-aged people, both inherently saddened by how life has turned out for the. When Marguerite’s purse gets stolen and Georges later finds it in a mall parking lot, their hopes, excitements, and obsessions arise – spiraling to a place neither can control.

The film is, as many have said of it thus far, a fresh and unexpected turn from Resnais, and certainly a film worth seeing simply for the challenge of understanding a true master’s work.

“Wild Grass” will be released by Sony in the spring.