Jean Eustache’s awkward first feature film “Mother and Whore” — The eye-catching 215-minute talkson, which has gained much renown since its world premiere at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, is more your home planet than a masterpiece. It feels like a rogue asteroid hurtling towards you.
Shown at last year’s exhibition new york film festivalThe 4K digitally restored version is being screened at. lincoln center From June 23rd to July 13th, as part of Eustache’s complete retrospective.
Eustache, a former Cahier du Cinema critic, considered The Mother and the Whore to be autobiographical. Set in the aftermath of the French Civil War in May 1968, this work is about the people of Troyes. Jean-Pierre Léaud, the personification of Parisian youth, plays the foul-mouthed lazy Alexandre, sexually liberated under the protection of a slightly older Marie (Bernadette Lafont, herself a New Wave icon). He is after a young nurse, Veronica (Eustache’s ex-girlfriend). her lover Françoise Leblanc).
Alexander is a creature of impulses and a relentless monster. Adopting and ditching attitudes, he charms Veronica, charms Marie, and wows viewers, like when he endures the gratification of washing the dishes while watching Marie do household chores. It’s absurd and self-hypnotic rants that make you.
A dandy who reads Proust and listens to Edith Piaf, Alexandre clings to the past, mostly the aborted revolution of 1968. He is also delusional. “What novel do you think it’s in?” cries an ex-girlfriend who ambushed him to make a crazy proposal.
Marie has the guts to run a boutique (although she and Alexandre live like students on mattresses on the floor), sweet and emotional. Veronica is self-contained and outspoken about her own active sex life, but perhaps as crazy as Alexander. Indeed, she is the most desperate of her three, as her final soliloquy shows. An up-and-coming actor sandwiched between two icons, LeBlanc delivers an extraordinary performance.
“Mothers and Whores” is mostly conversations in cafes, parked cars and beds. The book is filled with references to the film, but, as suggested by Alexander’s ex-lover, it feels as dense and psychologically resonant as the novel – perhaps Dostoevsky’s. This film, which looks at despair through the prism of sex, has something in common with Last Tango in Paris, including Leo. But it’s more of an anguish and mercy movie. Not the last word, sulky Marie puts on her blemished LP, serenading us with the cheery bitterness of Piaf’s self-reflective “Parisian Sweetness.”
In 1974, Mother and the Whore was critically acclaimed by New York Times critic Nora Thayer, who called the film a throwback to “1950s cinema sludge”. There’s nothing particularly ’50s-esque about her here other than the black-and-white cinematography, but Thayer’s complaint says: Otherwise the 60’s never happened. ” that’s right. This movie is a memorial movie.
Eustache produced several more personal works before committing suicide in 1981.French critic Serge Danny Eustache called him “his own real-life ethnologist” and added to “Lost Children” in May ’68 that “without him, they would have been left with nothing.” .
mother and prostitute
Until July 13th at Films at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. filmlink.org.
