La maman et la putain

Unfortunately, Jean Eustache (1938-1981) belongs like so many once leading French film makers nowadays to the great unknown ones whose movies are hard to find and are not released on international DVDs. Since we have a good old-fashioned video-store in Tucson, I had the chance to watch this 3 1/2-hour marathon masterwork that is not boring for ten seconds.

Since we speak here about one of the most discussed (and most controversially discussed) movies of all times, let me tell you my impression that the endless dialogs, originally typical for the early "Nouvelle Vague" of a Jacques Rivette or Alain Resnais appear almost ridiculous in this movie. The dialogs are basically monologues, mainly the longest ones spoken by Jean-Pierre Léaud. The most characteristic feature is that the intersections of the speeches of two people is almost zero. Léaud, or his character, Alexandre, pleases to tell more about himself than about the topics he is seemingly to speak. Therefore, one can hardly speak about communication in this movie. It is well possible that the director had a gargantuan satire in mind against the idle running of the once so hotly discussed political and sociological ideas, but the type of man Alexandre exists to all times, we find him already in Petron's "Satiricon", which work has actually great resemblance with "The Mother and the Whore".

Alexandre does not only nothing, but he has developed an own kind of metaphysics about the absence of acting, at least acting in the sense of responsibility toward the society whose part he is. He mocks at the people who run to work at 7 c'clock in the morning, when he is just busy having his last drink before he goes to bed in the apartment of one of his girlfriends from whose money he lives. He is unable to speak one sentence without quoting one of the leading thinkers between Nietzsche and Bernanos. Especially Sartre who is shown quickly in the French intellectual café "Aux Deux Magots", where Alexandre, too, is sitting all day, must serve as excuse for the life-style of Alexandre and his colleagues, because they suffer existential crisis from bourgeois nausea. However, the intellectual speeches of Alexandre seem to be rather pseudo-intellectual, and the sentences and quips he cites seem to come rather from a dictionary of quotations than from his actual reading of the respective books.

It is true: This movie demands an extremely broad European knowledge, especially the connoisseurship of French existentialist philosophy and there consequences to the 68 student revolution movement, but if you have this knowledge, than you will enjoy 215 minutes of your life by staring amazed into the TV and crying out with laughing like you have probably not done it since a long time.

In Paris, the pedantic Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his mate Marie (Bernadette Lafont) in her apartment, an open relationship. Alexandre, who is idle and chauvinist, spends his days reading, drinking and shagging women. After flirting with his former affair, Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), who tells him that she will marry soon her boyfriend, Alexandre meets the Laenne Hospital nurse Veronika Osterwald (Françoise Lebrun) and they schedule a date. Alexandre learns that Veronika is a promiscuous woman that loves to shag and introduces her to Marie. They have a threesome and Alexandre has a crush on Veronika.

"La Maman et la Putain" is an overrated and dull French New Wave cult-movie by Jean Eustache about the sexual adventures of a pedantic chauvinist. I do not have the intention to offend the umpteen fans of this director and film, but I really did not like this long film of three and half hours. There are witty dialogs and situations, but in general I found it very dull with empty characters.

The expensive DVD released in Brazil by Lume Distributor is a shameful recording of French television broadcasting with an announcement in the credits. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "A Mãe e a Puta" ("The Mother and the Whore")

This it the type of French movie other artists will use as a reference to make a parody after, or to oversimplify and exaggerate french cinema. A lot of talking, and repeating, a lot of overblown emotions, again a lot of talking between two people. This is what I call a boring movie. A movie I watched at 1.5x speed without any remorse.

A movie like many others before and after that show the missery of being part of a love triangle, no matter how open minded you think you are. Because when it comes to true romantic emotions, there is no place for more than two people. I don't think I am a prude but as this film shows and my past experiences taught me it will not end with a happy ending. But the happy ending I got was that it was over.

In what could have been seen as a coup towards the sexual "revolution" (purposefully I use quotations for that word), Jean Eustache wrote and directed The Mother and the Whore as a poetic, damning critique of those who can't seem to get enough love. If there is a message to this film- and I'd hope that the message would come only after the fact of what else this Ben-Hur length feature has to offer- it's that in order to love, honestly, there has to be some level of happiness, of real truth. Is it possible to have two lovers? Some can try, but what is the outcome if no one can really have what they really want, or feel they can even express to say what they want?

What is the truth in the relationships that Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud) has with the women around him? He's a twenty-something pseudo-intellectual, not with any seeming job and he lives off of a woman, Marie (Bernadette Lafont) slightly older than him and is usually, if not always, his lover, his last possible love-of-his-life left him, and then right away he picks up a woman he sees on the street, Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), who perhaps reminds him of her. Soon what unfolds is the most subtly torrid love triangle ever put on film, where the psychological strings are pulled with the cruelest words and the slightest of gestures. At first we think it might be all about what will happen to Alexandre, but we're mistaken. The women are so essential to this question of love and sex that they have to be around, talking on and on, for something to sink in.

We're told that part of the sexual revolution, in theory if not entirely in practice (perhaps it was, I can't say having not been alive in the period to see it first-hand), was that freedom led to a lack of inhibitions. But Eustache's point, if not entirely message, is that it's practically impossible to have it both ways: you can't have people love you and expect to get the satisfaction of ultimate companionship that arrives with "f***ing", as the characters refer over and over again.

The Mother and the Whore's strengths as far as having the theme is expressing this dread beneath the promiscuity, the lack of monogamy, while also stimulating the intellect in the talkiest talk you've ever seen in a movie. At the same time we see a character like Alexandre, who probably loves to hear himself talk whether it's about some movie he saw or something bad from his past, Eustache makes it so that the film itself isn't pretentious- though it could appear to be- but that it's about pretentiousness, what lies beneath those who are covering up for their internal flaws, what they need to use when they're ultimately alone in the morning.

If you thought films like Before Sunrise/Sunset were talky relationship flicks, you haven't met this. But as Eustache revels in the dialogs these characters have, sometimes trivial, or 'deep', or sexual, or frank, or occasionally extremely (or in a subdued manner) emotional, it's never, ever uninteresting or boring. On the contrary, for those who can't get enough of a *good* talky film, it's exceptional. While his style doesn't call out to the audaciousness that came with his forerunners in the nouvelle vague a dozen years beforehand, Eustache's new-wave touch is with the characters, and then reverberating on them.

This is realism with a spike of attitude, with things at time scathing and sarcastic, crude and without shame in expression. All three of the actors are so glued to their characters that we can't ever perceive them as 'faking' an emotion or going at all into melodrama. It's almost TOO good in naturalistic/realism terms, but for Eustache's material there is no other way around it. Luckily Leaud delivers the crowning chip of his career of the period, and both ladies, particularly Labrun as the "whore" Veronika (a claim she staggeringly refutes in the film's climax of sorts in one unbroken shot). And, as another touch, every so often, the director will dip into a quiet moment of thought, of a character sitting by themselves, listening to a record, and in contemplation or quiet agony. This is probably the biggest influence on Jim Jarmusch, who dedicated his film Broken Flowers to Eustache and has one scene in particular that is lifted completely (and lovingly) in approach from the late Parisian.

Sad to say, before I saw Broken Flowers, I never heard of Eustache or this film, and procuring it has become quite a challenge (not available on US DVD, and on VHS so rare it took many months of tracking at various libraries). Not a minute of that time was wasted; the Mother and the Whore is truly beautiful work, one of the best of French relationship dramas, maybe even just one of the most staggeringly lucid I've seen from the country in general. It's complex, it's sweet, it's cold, it's absorbing, and it's very long, perhaps too long. It's also satisfying on the kind of level that I'd compare to Scenes from a Marriage; true revelations about the human condition continue to arise 35 years after each film's release.

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.