The Mother and the Whore

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")

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.

The movie carries off the daunting challenge set by its extreme length: the first half or so is essentially a comedy of manners, with Leaud's rampant intellectualism constantly tipping over into borderline absurdity (underlined by the deadpan sketches of his friends and their wantonly do-nothing, posturing world; his manipulation of women almost masterful. But the spectrum shifts to show the psychological complexity beneath the 'whore' - in her long final monologue asserting her humanity and then traveling beyond that to assert the aridness of a relationship that doesn¹t generate children: it's as if the posturing were being ripped apart, as if everything was being reanalyzed from the most basic biology. And that reanalysis elevates the women - they both have careers whereas we¹re never sure how he finances himself; their friendship when it comes seems intuitive to an extent that he lacks, so that he's reduced to moping and grasping at opportunities. The final hour or so is an amazing topography of emotional upheaval, discovery and raw pain. An almost brilliant film that expresses the lie of the facile attitudinizing of the times and has an awesome grasp of psychological ambiguity and rawness.

... 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.

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.