We Won't Grow Old Together

We Won't Grow Old Together (Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, 1972) is Maurice Pialat's French drama, available to watch online on iFILM. Jean is a married filmmaker past forty. Catherine is much younger and still lives with her parents. For six years they've carried on between his other life and hers — hotel rooms, parked cars, borrowed holidays.

There's plenty of love in it, and it's nearly indistinguishable from exhaustion. Jean, played by Jean Yanne, turns on Catherine more and more: the digs, the cruelty, the breakups that dissolve into yet another reunion. Marlène Jobert plays a woman slowly working up the will to leave for good. The film barely bothers with plot. It just watches affection wear down to its cracks, one raw scene at a time, no score, no soft landings.

Pialat adapted his own autobiographical novel and pushed the tone toward something almost documentary — the camera catches the fights as if it stumbled onto them. Yanne took the Best Actor prize at Cannes for the role. This one is for viewers who want bitter European realism with no consolation, a close look at how intimacy dies. Stream We Won't Grow Old Together (1972) online on iFILM.