We Won't Grow Old Together (Maurice Pialat / France, 1972):
(Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble)

The dolorous title unexpectedly echoes the cuckolded boss in The Shop Around the Corner ("Well, she just didn't want to grow old with me"). The bloke (Jean Yanne) is a married filmmaker, "always angry, always sad," the Punch and Judy bond he shares with his mistress (Marlène Jobert) is exemplified during a glimpse of filming as he keeps nearly swatting her with the camera itself. The Möbius strip of poisoned romance, rupture and reconciliation and back again and again. A day at the beach, a visit to her parents, an appallingly abusive litany in a parked Renault: "Your only point of pride is your mediocrity." La colère et l'amour, toujours—he hopes to present her with his mother's wedding ring and instead slaps her for coming home late, the dance at the hotel gives way to near-rape in the boudoir. "Cement brings dishonor to a garden." Maurice Pialat's In a Lonely Place, shaved close to the nub so that laceration and tenderness remain in continuous collision. End of the affair, six years in the making, "as good as husband and wife." His actual wife (Macha Méril) is an estranged but commiserating figure, taking time from Russian travels to inform the ogre that the maiden is marrying somebody else. (The moment has them huddled around a bedroom lamp in a sort of indoors version of Millet's Angelus, a characteristic charging of the mundane.) False starts and false endings, a relentless rhythm of intimacy and terror. "Cinema is the only place you don't see men cry," the protagonist cites Ordet in rebuttal. One last caress, a busy Parisian street seen through a windshield cuts to a memory of lost happiness, inexorably faded into an undulating oceanic void. "When someone leaves, it's like they die." "It's worse. They're still alive." Fassbinder includes a clip in In a Year with 13 Moons, fittingly, one magnificent sadomasochist recognizes another. With Christine Fabréga, Jacques Galland, Harry-Max, Patricia Pierangeli, Maurice Risch, and Muse Dalbray.

--- Fernando F. Croce

Back to Reviews
Back Home