Both the overwhelming critical acceptance of Alex Ross Perry’s latest film, Listen Up Philip, and a renewed interest in Maurice Pialat’s 1972 film We Won’t Grow Old Together have accounted for one of the year’s more inspiring shared success stories. These films, which both follow struggling artists in deteriorating romantic relationships, are rife with thematic and aesthetic similarities that are hardly coincidental; Perry, who helmed a video tribute to Pialat featured on We Won’t Grow Old Together’s recent Kino Lorber Blu-ray release, hasn’t been shy about championing the late French auteur’s work and citing it as a key influence on Listen Up Philip.
Despite having a solid reputation in his homeland, Pialat has always been undervalued in the U.S., though We Won’t Grow Old Together was met with a wave of reappraisal this summer in the wake of its newfound home-video availability. Perry, before making a breakthrough with Listen Up Philip, had previously polarized critics and audiences with his hilarious yet uncompromising prior features, Impolex (2009) and The Color Wheel (2011). Both Listen Up Philip and We Won’t Grow Old Together are exceptionally personal works, featuring protagonists who bear undeniable likenesses to the filmmakers who created them. Pialat’s film stars Jean Yanne as a struggling documentarian who shares a vocation, imposing build and turbulent personal life with the director. Meanwhile, in Listen Up Philip, a perfectly cast Jason Schwartzman plays Philip Lewis Friedman, who physically mirrors Perry and shares his status as a newly notable member of New York’s intellectual lineage.
But aside from these surface similarities, what especially links Pialat and Perry is their shared ability to zero in on, magnify and skew absurd quotidian details. They internalize life just as any of us might, then offer us snatches of their experience. Their films are impressionist tapestries, moments strung together to reflect life’s volatile tempos. It’s the very rhythms of these works that account for their sheer unpredictability. We Won’t Grow Old Together may be about the cycle of continual, repetitive abuse which slowly erodes a relationship, but we’re never sure just when a scene will explode into violence, and whether it will be emotional or physical. The scene-to-scene threat of aggression is also why Pialat is able to truly touch us with glimpses of tenderness and generosity (sudden apologies, unexpected gifts, quiet laughter) that feel as natural as moments lifted from Jean Renoir’s warmer humanist works.
Listen Up Philip and We Won’t Grow Old Together also both rely heavily on elliptical editing that, without warning, jazzily skips ahead in time. We’re never quite sure if bookending scenes take place hours, weeks or months apart, and we learn not to care. Often in Pialat’s film, we witness what appears to be the primary couple’s bitter breakup, then suddenly cut to a scene of the same lovers placid and reconciled at an indeterminate point in the future. Perry’s feature takes a similarly erratic approach to portraying Philip’s rapidly deteriorating relationship with his photographer girlfriend, Ashley (Elisabeth Moss). The film’s asymmetrical narrative even dares to lose track of Philip entirely for a long stretch that focuses on Ashley’s steady personal growth in the wake of her boyfriend’s abrupt departure. This jagged editing style prizes chaotic expressiveness over any kind of reasonable continuity—which is, in fact, perfectly in keeping with the films’ lack of interest in strict verisimilitude, despite their semi-autobiographical nature.
In addition to its editing, Perry grounds his latest film in a post-Royal Tenenbaums bubble. The setting is a cinephile’s New York, in a nebulous era seemingly free of cell phones, laptops and other digital eyesores. It’s a sealed world, stained by a rusty, corduroy-brown palette (captured in 16mm and telephoto lenses by cinematographer Sean Price Williams) borrowed from Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen and John Cassavetes, and beautified by dreamy grain inherited from French art-house masters Philippe Garrel and Jean Eustache. However penetrating, even the film’s voiceover narration is as much a product of period fetishism as it is a tool for psychological insight; fleet and coolly detached, it’s an act of prose styling that willfully harkens back to the era of literary celebrities, tweed blazers and fancy typefaces of the kind used in the film’s credits.
If Pialat’s work takes place in a setting that seems closer to reality, his treatment of dialogue is no less individualistic. Self-deprecating, unromantic and raw, he has often been compared to John Cassavetes, another wholly individualistic filmmaker sometimes glibly identified as a realist. Sure, Pialat’s observant visual style has a cinema vérité feel, tending toward unfussy medium shots, natural light and long takes. But aside from his editing, his most recognizable trait as a director may be his penchant for suffocating, marathon scenes in which one character mercilessly berates another. While We Won’t Grow Old Together is practically an onslaught of such instances, the purest example of this technique comes in a fantasy sequence near the end of his 1983 film, À nos amours, in which a father played by Pialat himself crashes a dinner party in order to extravagantly belittle the family he recently abandoned, who had become newly happy in his absence. It’s brutally funny in its own merciless way, but wise enough to incriminate Pialat’s character just as much as those he victimizes.
Perry’s dialogue, by contrast, tends to come in lengthy, hyper-articulate chunks. While stopping just shy of a Woody Allen- or Wes Anderson-level of affectedness, he writes characters that noticeably speak with the same voice, and it’s unsurprising that he has admitted that each of the key players in Listen Up Philip represents a different aspect of himself. The speech patterns in the film are often lopsidedly hilarious, and individual lines can be tonally incongruous with the scenes that surround them. Philip’s forced attempt to shoehorn a laughably pointless Jacques Tati reference (“My uncle—Mon Oncle. Like the film”) into casual conversation recalls Max Fischer’s wholesale thievery of lines from Barry Lyndon, The Godfather and Heat. Elsewhere, a PR-friendly rival writer, resembling a David Foster Wallace/Dave Eggers hybrid, dismisses Philip thusly before exiting the frame in an extravagant limo: “I’m a nice guy. Read an article about me. I’m [air quotes] self-deprecating.”
It’s difficult to think of such caricatured, intermittently absurd writing as an attempt at pure realism. But Perry’s and Pialat’s dialogue parallel the kind of disconnected, perversely one-sided and tragically funny conversations that are part of the fabric of daily life. Their writing is also tonally reminiscent of Cassavetes’s most comedic films, such as Husbands (1970), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) and Love Streams (1984). A similarly curious breed of humor is present even amidst the bleakness of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), in which the grim planning of the titular hit devolves into a totally bizarre back-and-forth about what kind of meat will best distract the bookie’s guard dogs (“You could buy hamburgers.” “Don’t put any mustard on ’em, either.”). Cassavetes may have been the best at depicting the short distance between tears and laughter, but the films of Perry and Pialat are certainly among the finer studies of this everyday phenomenon.
The out-of-nowhere, unharmonious flashes of dialogue present in these works show us that the filmmakers are unafraid to rupture not only the notion of objective reality, but also the unique filmic realities that they themselves have created. As if intent on driving this point home, Listen Up Philip’s voiceover narration closes the film with a quote lifted not from one of Perry’s professed literary influences (Philip Roth, Richard Yates or William Gaddis), but Guns N’ Roses. Coupled with relentless editing, Perry’s script arrives at an unsentimental kind of storytelling that expresses something devastatingly beautiful about the speed at which life changes and emotions blur.