The Mother and the Whore

This is a wonderful film. My personal second best film of all time. ("Les Mepris" by Jean -Luc Goddard being the first.) La Maman et La Putain is beautiful in its evocation of the complicated emotions that arise in loving and / or sexual relationships. Jean Eustache is a man I would have liked to have had a chat with. He was an intelligent observer of l'etat humaine.No daftie. This film was made over thirty years ago but to me is contemporary in the manner in which it discusses the eternal themes of human interaction. The monolgue by the character Veronika is sheer brilliance..in acting and writing...this particular scene is cinema or drama at its best. Never seen anything to compete with it in the cinema yet. Thoroughly recommend this film. Three and a half hours. So?

One of the last classics of the French New Wave. For direction, cineaste Jean Eustache drew from the simplicity of early-century cinema; for story, Eustache drew on the torments of his own complicated love life. So many things can be said of this film - observationally brilliant; self indulgently overlong; occasionally hilarious; emotionally draining...etc. etc. In my mind, whatever complaints that can be leveled against this film are easily overshadowed by its numerous strengths. Every film student, writer, or simply anyone willing to handle a 3 hour film with no abrupt cuts, no music video overstyling, no soap opera-like plot twists, and no banal dialogue should make it a point to see this movie. Everything is to be admired: the writing (concise, clever, surprisingly funny), acting (everyone, quite simply, is perfect in their respective roles), and, simple direction (the viewer feels like a casual observer within the film) make this film unforgettable. This is undoubtedly a film that stays with you.

I put off reviewing it for quite a while; I just couldn't come to terms with its rejection of the New Wave. Eustache has given us the talkiest movie ever, if you except those marathon Rivette films from the same period (I survived a showing of Out One: Spectre).

The camera doesn't move: it is parked in front of the actors in cafes and restaurants. The close camera placement forces us to concentrate on the conversations, which are monologues by Alexandre interspersed with explosions from Veronika. The romantic word-spinning from Alexandre is of this ilk: "The day I stop suffering, I'll have become someone else," or "In May 1968 a whole cafe was crying. It was beautiful. A tear gas bomb had exploded... a crack in reality had opened up," or most poetically, "I don't do anything, I let time do it." The retorts from Veronika are sometimes astonishing in their savagery: "Watch out, you'll push in my Tampax."; "I've screwed the maximum of Jews and Arabs."; (serving tea)"I like the feel of a prick against my ass, even if it's soft. One sugar or two?" It's as if a Proust character somehow left his drawing room to go slumming with a woman out of L-F Celine's Death on the Installment Plan.

This film ought to be seen by anyone interested in French film of that period--the 70's--but be aware of the static, slow-moving nature of the work.

... is because of films like this.

Don't get me wrong. I like independent cinema, and particularly like good foreign films, but this film could have been cut by at least an hour.

I'll explain.

The film revolves around a self centered young man who professes he loves certain women, but is really looking for someone to love him. Enter a woman who doesn't love herself, but finds this same young man, taps his energy, and both wind up "flowering" for it.

This movie revolves around the sexual morays and politics of a small group of Parisians. The film starts out very strong. Actors present characters in an extended first act that we would like to get to know, but, unfortunately this pic becomes the poster boy for the proverbial "long boring French film" replete with characters who light up cigarettes and talk in either cafés or materially spartan rented rooms about how life should be different, and what it all means. Toss in an Oedipal complex/undercurrent, and you have the quintessential French avante-garde flick.

Huh.

Inspite of this there's some good material in this film, but director Jean Eustache (probably to make up for lack of scheduling and some technical aspects) throws a lot of dialog at the audience that would've have been better served with some visual cues.

All in all it shows how messed up an certain sect of French culture really is, and, perhaps ironically, drives home a realist message regarding the act of coupling.

Technically it's bare bones. Lots of natural lighting is fused with high contrast B&W cinematography, and to add to the rugged feel of the film the scratch track is used. Little to no looping of dialog. You can hear what pros call "room tone" as it was actually recorded during filming.

I could go off the deep end and call this film self-indulgent, pretentious et al, but will say instead that the exposition given to the story was "over-exposed" (for lack of a better term). The symbolism is fine, but a lack of visuals and a borderline in-you-face delivery of certain dialog, hampers what could have been a much better film. By that I don't mean commercially successful nor accessible, but a film that could have delivered the same gists, character and message without the flaunting its strive for artistic excellence.

It is not an easy film to watch - it is over three and a half hours long and it is composed entirely of conversations. Yet it is so incredibly compelling and ruthlessly observational of the human character, that it is, in my humble opinion, one of the very greatest films of all time.

The film is depressing, cynical and cruel. (If you want something uplifting, see Jacques Rivette's fantastic Céline and Julie Go Boating, which was made around the same time). It shows the idealism of the late 1960s to be nothing different from the society that it was trying to change.

It involves a supposedly liberated ménage-à-trois between Alexandre (played by Jean-Pierre Leaud), Marie (Bernadette Lafont) and Veronika (Francoise Lebrun). Yet Alexandre is shown to be as chauvinistic and jealous as any other man. The women are exposed as being willingly subservient and defining their femininity through the male gaze.

The film is an extremely icy end to the highly revolutionary French New Wave. This movement was one of the most significant movements in film history and had a profound effect on cinema as we know it. Jean-Pierre Leaud was one of the key actors of the New Wave, having starred (among other films) in the influential Les Quatres Cent Coups (1959) by Francois Truffaut as a rebellious teenager. Director Jean Eustache is not as well known as other directors from the New Wave, but he should be.

There is no improvisation (unlike in John Cassavetes's similar films made in the US) and the dialogue comes from real-life conversations. The film is resonant with Eustache's personal experiences. For example, Francoise Lebrun was a former lover of Eustache. Eustache himself committed suicide in 1981 and the real-life person that the character Marie was based on, did too. The anger and bitterness all culminate in a harrowing monologue by Veronika delivered directly to the audience, breaking down the coldly objective nature of the rest of the film. This mesmerising, personal, and honest filmic statement remains one of the most revealing films of human nature around.