Marlene Jobert, in her own swimsuit

  • Marlene Jobert, in her own swimsuit

Maurice Pialat’s We Won’t Grow Old Together (1972) screens just two more times at the Gene Siskel Film Center before it leaves town, tonight at 6 PM and tomorrow at 8 PM, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. An early feature by one of France’s most important filmmakers, it ranks with Yilmaz Güney’s The Friend (which screened at Doc Films in February) and Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (which screened at the Siskel in May) as one of the year’s great rediscoveries. And like those other features, it seems to have lost none of its power in the decades since it was made. Pialat’s purposely arhythmic storytelling—to say nothing of his characters’ capacity for emotional violence—has a way of keeping spectators on edge.