‘The mother and the whore’: a threesome and then some
Jean Eustache’s unwieldy first feature film “The Mother and the Whore” – a gripping 215-minute talkathon, as well as a cause célèbre since its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973 – feels less like a masterpiece than a rogue asteroid hurtling toward your own home planet.
Shown on last year New York Film Festivalthe 4K digital restoration is shown Lincoln center June 23 – July 13 as part of a full Eustache retrospective.
Eustache, one-time critic of Cahiers du Cinéma, considered “The Mother and the Whore” autobiographical. Set in the aftermath of the civil unrest in France in May 1968, it involves a ménage-à-trois. Alexandre, an eloquent slacker played by the epitome of Parisian youth, Jean-Pierre Léaud, is held captive by the slightly older Marie (Bernadette Lafont, herself a New Wave signifier) as he pursues a young, sexually liberated nurse, Veronika (Eustache’s former lover Françoise Lebrun).
Alexandre is a creature of impulse and a monster of perseverance. Posing and rejecting poses, he is given over to absurd, self-hypnotic tirades that fascinate Veronika, charm Marie, and frighten the viewer, as if insisting on the satisfaction of doing the dishes while watching Marie perform the chore.
Alexandre, a dandy who reads Proust and listens to Edith Piaf, is obsessed with the past, especially the failed revolution of 1968. He also suffers from delusions. “What novel do you think you’re in?” exclaims a former girlfriend he’s ambushed into making a manic marriage proposal.
Marie, grounded enough to own a boutique (although she and Alexandre live like college students with a mattress on the floor), is indulgent and emotional. Veronika, self-contained and open about her active sex life, may be just as crazy as Alexandre. Certainly, as her last monologue shows, she is the most desperate of the three. Lebrun, a budding actor caught between two icons, delivers an extraordinary performance.
‘The mother and the whore’ consists largely of conversations, in cafes, parked cars and bed. It’s full of movie references, but, as suggested by Alexandre’s ex, feels as dense and psychologically resonant as a novel – perhaps one by Dostoyevsky. Viewing desperation through the prism of sex, the film has things in common with ‘Last Tango in Paris’, including Léaud. However, it is a more tortured and compassionate film. In not quite the last word, a petulant Marie puts on a scratched LP to serenade us with the gleeful bitterness of Piaf’s self-reflexive “Les Amants de Paris.”
In 1974, “The Mother and the Whore” was brutally reviewed by New York Times critic Nora Sayre, who denounced the film as a throwback to “the movie sludge of the 1950s.” There’s nothing particularly 1950s here except the black-and-white cinematography, but Sayre’s complaint is telling: “The discoveries of the past decade have been obliterated. Or else the 1960s never happened.” Precisely. The film is a eulogy.
Eustache made several more personal features before committing suicide in 1981. The French critic Sergey Daney called him “an ethnologist of his own reality”, adding that Eustache gave a face to the “lost children” of May ’68: “Without him there would be nothing left of them.”
The mother and the whore
Through July 13 in Film at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; filmlinc.org.