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Maurice Pialat's second feature, We Won't Grow Old Together, became an unlikely commercial success upon its release. Far from viewer-friendly, it tells the story of the endless breakups and makeups of a highly unstable yet apparently indissoluble couple. It's a sort of love stoiy told in inverted terms, depicting the protracted end of a five-year affair, with its arbitrary disagreements, sudden mood shifts, moments of irrational anger, and displays of stinging contempt, presented with a genuine, unmeasured violence.
"You've never succeeded at anything and you never will," says Jean (Jean Yanne), a 40-year-old married filmmaker, to his younger, working-class lover Catherine (Marlene Jobert). "And do you know why? Because you are vulgar, irremediably vulgar, and not only are you vulgar, you are ordinary." These are the film's most celebrated lines, quoted in the original trailer as well as on the back of the DVD recently released in France-a sort of brutalist alternative to the famous line from Love Story: "Love means never having to say you're sorry."
Certainly, no one says they're sorry very often in Pialat's film, or at least means it for long. The director summed up the film's structure in a 1983 interview with French Premiere's Marc...