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.
© James Travers 2023
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Next Maurice Pialat film:
Loulou (1980)