French Classic "We Won't Grow Old Together" Comes to NYC 40 Years Later

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 24 June 2012 11:48

Written by Laura Blum

We Won't Grow Old Together
directed by Maurice Pialat
starring Jean Yanne, Marlène Jobert

We Won't Grow Old Together is the title -- and plot -- of Maurice Pialat's second feature, which premiered stateside at the 1972 New York Film Festival. Forty years later, it's high time to give this stormy romantic drama a commercial engagement on this side of the Atlantic.

Time so high that the Festival's keeper, Film Society of Lincoln Center, is doing so June 22 - 28, 2012 as part of a year-long retrospective of NYFF’s first 49 years to salute its 50th edition.

Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble arrives in a spanking new print which first spent a week at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Finally US audiences can discover this Cannes Film Festival prize-winner that went on to sell nearly two million tickets in French cinemas.

Fashioned by the post-New Wave director from his autobiographical novel, the film concerns itself with the last gasps of a turbulent relationship.

Jean (Jean Yanne) is a fortyish documentary-maker stuck in a career rut and brimming with bile. Why dewy ingenue Catherine (Marlène Jobert) drinks his bitters may be a bit of challenge for contemporary audiences to fathom. Sexual attraction, a fledgling sense of self and Pygmalion dynamics at least partly account for the working class 20-something's lingering enthrallment six years into the affair. 

The adulterous couple trysts in cars and seaside hotels in a losing battle to postpone the inevitable. With each round, Jean's put-downs become more brutal -- even literally landing blows -- yet any referee will note his declining powers over Catherine. In and out of their co-dependency they go as both rumble then rally at the edge of romantic hell.

Pialat himself pulls no punches in his bruising self-critique. His alter-ego may loathe himself and those who love him, but no more than Pialat does or asks the viewer to.

Would that Pialat were so simple...

Again and again Catherine indulges Jean's inner beast. Can't she see that he must be grabbed by the horns, and not coddled in his artistic failures or abusive fury? Our sympathies go out to martyr Catherine, but a subtler truth resides with her persecutor. Intimacy  requires a united front against one's demons.  

If enabling reaches new highs with Catherine and Jean, it also has a field day with Jean's wife of 11 years (Macha Méril), who has long since accepted his dalliance. She's more crushed than he when it falls apart.

In the film's doleful parting shot, Pialat leaves us to ponder how history may be doomed to repeat itself or wrest free from its vicious cycles. First in color, then through the faded memory of black and white, Jean flashes back on his erstwhile mistress splashing in the ocean. 

Will new love keep Catherine far from Jean's imperious realm? Will she miss his cruelty and come back for more? If you've ever bereaved so much as a pet, be prepared to jog your own memories of loss and regret, relief and self-reacquaintance.

Those who have only been exposed to the bon bons or bang bangs of today's derivative French cinema are in for a surprise with Pialat. For the sake of English-speaking cinephiles he has often been compared to John Cassavetes, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. None is a match for his misanthropy.

To look back on Pialat's 10-feature canon is to experience a wince of pain. There's cancer, abuse, criminals, abortion, corruption and mental illness, among other scourges that compelled his attention. If his misery loved company, it didn't always find it among the comfier, more genteel Cahiers du Cinema bunch.

Not that Pialat's rebelliousness, modest origins or unfashionable interest in autobiography made him a total outsider; Sous le soleil de Satan (Under the Sun of Satan) was one his three films to star Gérard Depardieu and it won the 1987 Palme d'Or at Cannes. And À nos amours (To Our Loves) took the 1984 César, or French Academy Award, for Best Film.

Pialat began fiddling with cameras in his teens, but he came late to the business of filmmaking. He was 43 when he made his first feature in 1967, L'enfance nue (Naked Childhood), a hard-scrabble slice of social-realism about an abandoned 10-year-old boy thrust into foster care. Though it netted the Prix Jean Vigo, it lacked marquee cachet and slumped at the box office.

Next, for We Won't Grow, he tapped more recognizable names. Jean Yanne, whose credits include Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend, took Best Actor award at Cannes for his turn as the imperious Jean. Jobert also came with the Godard seal of approval (Masculin Féminin). 

Méril as Jean's long-suffering wife, Harry-Max as his recovering alcoholic father and Christine Fabréga and Jacques Galland as Catherine's frowning parents give uniformly strong performances, no small compensation for the film's afflicting content.

And Pialat had the filmic courage of his convictions. His signature visual style, coaxed out by editors Arlette Langmann and Corinne Lazare, jolts the narrative forward with elliptical cuts that economize on story and lend an appropriately unsettling feel.  

We Won't Grow Old Together patterns its own growth in escalating cycles of entropy and coming together. Few if any scripts could survive today's doctoring with such recitations. But the essential litany is timeless: art is the eternal place for making sense of experience, even if the ordeal culminated in a parting of ways.

We Won't Grow Old Together 
part of...

50 Years of The New York Film Festival
[a year-long screening retrospective of the fest’s first 49 years]

Film Society of Lincoln Center
Various theaters, Lincoln Center campus
New York, NY 10023

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