Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (1972)
Directed by Maurice Pialat

Film Review

Nothing but the truth

Authenticity is the quality that most distinguishes auteur cinema from its commercial counterpart.  For Maurice Pialat, France's most perfect example of the auteur filmmaker, truth was everything - not the deceptive surface truth of the crudest form of cinéma vérité in which a director merely points a camera at everyday life and commit to celluloid what he sees with his eyes, but a deeper truth that requires a meticulous and arduous process of reconstitution of filmic elements into a spatio-temporal artefact truly reflective of human experience.  In his youth, Pialat had intended to become a painter, and whilst he was unable to fulfil this ambition (he gave up the vocation suddenly in 1946) it was with the mentality of a painter, not a photographer, that he perfected his art as a filmmaker.  Pialat's mania for authenticity, whilst it delivered great cinema, came at huge personal cost as it would often cause irreparable harm to personal relationships and nourish his own pitiless inner demons.   By adapting his novel Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (We Won't Grow Old Together), in which he vividly recounts the most painful emotional upheaval of his life, Pialat must have known that he would be committing himself - and his actors - to the mother of all sadomasochistic hellrides.  But, to coin a phrase, he could do no other.

The making of Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble - Pialat's second feature and the first he made for his newly founded (and short-lived) production company Lido Films - was a fraught and painful experience, but it gave the 47-year-old director his first commercial success and earned him considerable critical acclaim.  (The film attracted an audience of 1.7 million spectators in France and was the director's second biggest hit at the box office after Police (1985), his sole foray into genre cinema.)  The pathologically self-critical, impossible to please Pialat was naturally unfazed by such an overwhelmingly positive reaction to the film (although he presumably welcomed the money and attention it brought him, neither of which he could have expected).  As a piece of art, the film fell way short of its director's expectations and he considered it a far lesser work than his previous feature, L'Enfance nue (1968), a sober indictment of how the French state treats parentless children which had won him the Prix Jean Vigo and some critical praise but failed to make any money.  This dissatisfaction may have been one of the reasons why the director, with characteristic perseverance and perversity, chose to repeat this gruelling experience in cathartic self-therapy a few years later, using a subsequent bruising relationship (with his frequent collaborator Arlette Langmann) as the basis of his fifth feature - Loulou (1980).

Each one of Maurice Pialat's films has a strong autobiographical element but Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble is his most determined attempt at reconstituting a substantial part of his private life as cinema.  It was his striking physical resemblance to Jean Yanne that led him to cast the actor - an incredibly popular star of the period - in the lead role, a dangerous choice as it turned out since both men had serious anger management issues and would inevitably come to blows, imperilling the production almost from Day One.  The fact that Yanne's wife (from whom he was separated at the time) was in hospital dying from cancer didn't help matters.  The actor's frequent absence from the set early on in the shoot and understandable emotional instability raised tensions so high that filming was very nearly abandoned before it had started.  Pialat's obsessive resolve to recreate his past as accurately as possible would greatly impact on the choice of locations and sets, including details in set dressings (such as paintings from his own private collection), and it even went as far as dictating the style and colour of a bathing costume to be worn by Yanne's co-star Marlène Jobert.  It also led him to a paroxysm of rage when he discovered that a hotel room he had once stayed in (and which provided a crucial scene in the film) had had its wallpaper changed in the intervening years.  Without Jobert's immense diplomatic skills and willingness to act as a go-between for the director and his lead actor the film would probably have never made it to the editing suite.

Acting as an extreme sport

Whilst the filming of Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble was a nightmare that neither actor would ever want to repeat, it marked a career highpoint for both Jean Yanne and Marlène Jobert, both turning in an exceptional performance that was at the limit of their capabilities.  By this time, albeit still fairly early on in their screen careers, Yanne and Jobert had both risen to the height of their popularity and had become two of the biggest names in mainstream French cinema.  Yanne had first acquired celebrity status as a wild card television comedian a decade previously but he proved to be a more than capable serious actor in such films as Que la bête meure (1969) and Le Boucher (1970), directed by one of the Nouvelle Vague's leading lights, Claude Chabrol.  In the early 1970s, he would go on to become a successful director in his own right, with a string of characteristically truculent comedies such as Tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil (1972) and Deux Heures moins le quart avant Jésus-Christ (1982).  Marlène Jobert, a former model, achieved almost overnight stardom for her work on Yves Robert's Alexandre le Bienheureux (1968) and Guy Casaril's L'Astragale (1968), before notching up a notable hit with René Clément's Le Passager de la pluie (1969), in which she appeared alongside Charles Bronson.  Yanne and Jobert were already popular with audiences and critics but it was their unlikely collaboration with Maurice Pialat that earned them their greatest acclaim.  Yanne was honoured with the Best Actor award at Cannes in 1972 for his performance on the film, although he refused at accept the prize as, by this stage, his relationship with Pialat had broken down completely and he wanted nothing more to do with him.

For a director who was as fiercely committed to the truth as Pialat undoubtedly was it might appear strange that he would engage the services of celebrity actors that were so strongly associated with the kind of money-driven populist cinema for which he had immense contempt.  Paradoxically, he would work with grandes vedettes on the bulk of his subsequent films - most notably Gérard Depardieu (who appeared in four of his ten features), Isabelle Huppert (Loulou), Sophie Marceau (Police) and Jacques Dutronc (Van Gogh), as well as non-professional actors and promising newcomers (including Sandrine Bonnaire).  Experienced professional actors were in fact an essential requirement for Pialat's pretty unique approach to authentic filmmaking, as he placed great demands on his performers to simulate as truthfully as possible real emotions, through an incredibly rigorous process of repetition and refinement that demanded not just skill but incredible stamina.  Like Robert Bresson, the other sui generis filmmaker with whom he is often compared, Pialat would film scenes over and over again, acquiring a mass of film footage that presented a dauntingly time-consuming challenge for himself and his editor when it came to assembling the final work at the editing stage.

In his efforts to heighten the truth and emotional intensity of the performances, Pialat would often place his actors in confined spaces where they were uncomfortably close together, or do something shocking that would take them by surprise (a good example being the famous dinner scene in À nos amours where he suddenly appears on set as a character who - or so the cast believed - had just been written out of the story).  There are scenes in Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble where the acting is so viscerally raw and spontaneous that you could swear it was entirely improvised.  In fact, what we see on the screen is the end result of a meticulously carried out process of preparation, repeated shooting and laborious editing, by which Pialat was able to obtain precisely what he was demonically driven to bring into being - not just the mere illusion of authenticity arrived at by the fluke of serendipity, but the real thing, obtained by extraordinary hard work that involved the gratuitous shedding of copious quantities of blood, sweat and tears.

When love turns nasty

Pialat was utterly ruthless in exploiting Yanne's emotional distress after his wife's death, and whilst such psychological cruelty made their working relationship fractious and ultimately impossible, this allowed the director to extract from his lead actor the most impressive performance of his entire career.  Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble is not a comfortable film to watch as it depicts the breakdown of a romantic relationship between two patently ill-matched individuals with harrowing honesty and rigour - along with enough political incorrectness (in the appalling way the female protagonist is mistreated by her lover) to stoke the feminist movement for a century. Yanne's character Jean is probably the most grotesquely odious in Pialat's entire oeuvre, an overly possessive narcissist who routinely abuses his mistress Catherine (Jobert), calling her the most offensive names and slapping her whenever she exhausts his patience.  As obnoxious, infantile and ill-tempered as the character is, he doesn't entirely lose our sympathy and it is surprisingly easy to warm to him when he shows his kinder, more compassionate side.  Scenes such as the one where he playfully teases his lover in the sea reveal a very different side to his nature, so sunny and affectionate that you can't help but like him.

Yanne found the experience of playing such a complex and mercurial individual (so obviously modelled on Pialat, but not so far removed from his own multi-faceted persona) intolerable, and this may have been an important factor in his reluctance to take on any other dramatic roles over the next few decades.  It wasn't until the 1990s that Yanne became once more habituated to serious roles, in films such as Claude Chabrol's Madame Bovary (1991) and Jacques Audiard's Regarde les hommes tomber (1994).  Pialat did something to Yanne that the latter could never forgive, which was to hold an all-revealing mirror up to is own failings as a human being.  Jobert's performance is no less laudable and matches her co-star's in its unwavering true-to-life realism.  Her convincing portrayal of a sensitive young woman taking control of her emotional life would have chimed with the second wave of feminism that was becoming one of the most important social phenomena of the time.  The actress's obvious aptitude for playing an ordinary woman who is outwardly vulnerable but inwardly endowed with a feisty resilience would later be put to good use by Yves Boisset on his popular thriller Folle à tuer (1975).

Through the combined efforts of Pialat and his two talented lead actors Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble comes closest than perhaps any other French film (before or since) to depicting the exquisite torment of a couple in terminal decline after a period of intense passion.  It feels like a mournful requiem for a love that refuses to die even when it has all but passed into oblivion and exists only as a sweetly sour regret in the hearts of the two protagonists.  In both its subject matter and its remorselessly honest approach, this remarkable study of a relationship breakdown prefigures Ingmar Bergman's closely related Scenes From a Marriage, which was originally made for television in 1973 but was re-edited as an internationally acclaimed feature film in 1974.  As impressive as Bergman's later work is, Pialat's film has a much greater sense of uncompromising heart-piercing honesty about it.  The impression that Jean and Catherine are hopelessly trapped in a relationship that is killing them both is amplified by Pialat's confining mise-en-scène, which places them repeatedly in a tight frame within crushingly small spaces, often with almost unbearably long takes filmed by a camera in a fixed position.  The total absence of music also helps to accentuate the claustrophobic brutality of the images.

For a while, the couple appear to get along well together, but then a trivial little incident prompts an angry retort and within seconds they are tearing pieces off each other.  Eventually, tensions rise so high that they are forced to separate.  But, as if they are tethered to one another by a long piece of elastic, they soon end up back together, in the same pressure cooker prison, and the whole sorry saga repeats itself - again and again and again.  This is Pialat's grim but sincere assessment of conjugal life - a constant round of falling out and making up - effectively Groundhog Day for masochists.  What makes the film interesting, however, is that the pattern isn't entirely repetitive.  Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the two halves of the couple do evolve as their seesaw relationship progressively deteriorates, Catherine becoming stronger, better equipped to free herself, as Jean's morale sinks ever deeper in his increasingly desperate attempts to rekindle a dead romance.  Jean's growing sense of abandonment as his mistress finally acquires the confidence to leave him and start a new life is palpably felt in the film's closing scenes (a stark counterpoint to how the film began), and leaves us in close communion with a pitiful man grieving for the loss of something delicate and precious.  The growing sense of melancholy in the film's latter half is supported by subtle changes in Luciano Tovoli's remarkably expressive cinematography, with mellow autumnal hues gradually supplanting the lighter palette employed in the early part of the film.  By the end of the turbulent psychodrama, we have no doubt that the affair has finally run its course and we share Jean's profound sense of loss as the newly emboldened Catherine steps out of his car - and his life - forever.

The compulsive loner

Abandonment is a theme that is central to Maurice Pialat's oeuvre - indeed, it was most probably the overriding preoccupation of his life.  In L'Enfance nue (his inspired debut feature) and La Maison des bois (the seven-part serial he was subsequently commissioned to direct for French televison), the abject solitude of neglected children is powerfully rendered, whilst rejection in adulthood plays a crucial part in his later films - most notably Loulou (where the cuckolded male character is based on Pialat) and Van Gogh (the neglected genius with whom the director felt a close kinship).  For most (if not all) of his life, Pialat saw himelf as an outsider.  He made his first professional film (a short entitled L'Amour exist) in 1960, just as the French New Wave had gotten under way, but he ended up being excluded from the movement and later became highly critical of it (dismissing it as a mere cultural phenomenon).  Even though François Truffaut encouraged him to make his first feature (offering both guidance and financial support), Pialat rigidly distanced himself from the Nouvelle Vague, preferring the solitary existence of a lone maverick developing his own unique aesthetic.

The rip-roaring success of Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble was followed by the disheartening failure of La Gueule ouverte (1974) and Passe ton bac d'abord (1978), two films that were way ahead of their time in their portrayal of living with cancer and youth disaffection.  Despite these setbacks, the director persevered and his next five features proved to be immensely popular both with cinema audiences and the critics.  From the 1980s to the present time, Maurice Pialat's influence on French cinema has been incalculable (arguably exceeding that of the French New Wave directors in their entirety).  Pialat's rigorous technique and heroic striving for authenticity has inspired successive generations of committed auteurs (Catherine Breillat, Catherine Corsini, Xavier Beauvois, Noémie Lvovsky, and many others) with the result that France remains a world leader in auteur cinema.  Concerning Pialat's place in film art, the title of his second feature would be a highly inappropriate epithet.  His body of work and French cinema have matured in tandem for decades, and look set to do so for many years to come, growing old together but remaining forever young.

Film Synopsis

For the past six years, Jean, a struggling filmmaker in his forties, has been pursuing a turbulent love affair with a much younger woman, Catherine.  An insecure and needy man, Jean still lives with his wife Françoise but is now spending more of his time with his mistress, who is anxious for her lover to get a divorce so that he can marry her.  Despite their strong emotional bond, Jean cannot commit himself fully to a long-term relationship with Catherine, and it isn't long before disenchantment sets in on both sides.  During a filming assignment in Carmargue, where Catherine assists Jean as his sound engineer, the couple have a violent falling out but they manage to patch things up before they head back to Paris.  A pattern of heated rows and affectionate reconciliations soon becomes established, as the two lovers begin their excruciatingly slow and painful process of estrangement.  Finally, Catherine can bear Jean's violent outbursts no longer and she walks out, heading for Provence to stay at her grandmother's house.  Unable to let her go, Jean rejoins Catherine with the firm intention of marrying her, but by this stage the relationship is beyond repair.

A weekend stay in Honfleur ends with Catherine gaining a new-found confidence in herself.  When Jean finally summons up the nerve to marry her, she can now see that he is totally unsuited to her and promptly turns him down.  She is ready for them to go their separate ways, but Jean still cannot accept that their affair is over.  He continues to harangue his lover, not knowing that he is no longer a part of her life.  After leaving to make a new start in Brittany, Catherine puts a final end to their relationship with two two letters and a phone call.  Unable to make sense of what has happened, Jean begins badgering Catherine's parents for any information concerning her future plans.  When this proves fruitless, he returns to his wife and she is the one who tells him the truth that he cannot bear to hear.  Catherine has apparently fallen in love with another man and intends to marry him in the near future.  Can this really be the end of the affair?  Jean has one last chance to get Catherine to change her mind, but she has no intention of falling in with his plans.  For her, their once passionate affair is now dead and buried.  The time has come for Jean to wake up to the fact so that they can both move on with their lives.