![The Mother and the Whore [VHS]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51YVAEZEXEL.__AC_SX300_SY300_QL70_ML2_.jpg)
Can you take a mostly uneventful plot with more than 90% of "static conversations" and make a coherent, intriguing and engaging film to hold the absolute attention of your audience for the entire 3 hours and 40 minutes? In this 1973 black-and-white film,
The Mother and the Whore [VHS
] (La Maman et la Putain in French), Jean Eustache and his team achieved all these and more. For me, this is a masterpiece, an overwhelming experience comparable to François Truffaut's The 400 Blows.
Indeed, the reference to The 400 Blows is not merely coincidence. The lead actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, playing Alexandre here, began his distinguished career as Antoine Doinel in Truffaut's debut film 14 years ago. Alexandre was involved in the May 1968 Movement in France, a defining event for many in his generation. The film's story happens over a period of a few days in the summer of 1972 in Paris. At his late 20s Alexandre is an unemployed young man living in with a boutique owner Marie (Bernadette Lafont). He picked up a Polish nurse Veronika (Françoise Lebrun)(*1) at the café Les Deux Magots after an unsuccessful marriage proposal to a former love, Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten). Three of them are then entangled in a promiscuous triangle affair.
If the plot reads like a melodrama, it is. Alexandre is an obsessive talker, a pseudo intellectual who loves to hear himself talk about everything, from mundane jokes to personal fantasies, with references to Marcel Proust (Alexandre often holds a volume of In Search of Lost Time in café Flores), Robert Bresson (Weingarten appeared previously in Bresson's film Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971)) and Jean-Paul Sartre (in Les Deux Magots). The entire film is comprised mostly of conversations, with music playing occasional but important transitions. (Music includes Jacques Offenbach's
La Belle Hélène
and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's
Requiem
, together with other pop music and French chansons which I am not familiar with.) On top of that, there is no poetic editing (a la Alain Resnais or Ingmar Bergman)(*2), no spectacular shots (a la Orson Welles), no deliberate grittiness often associated to independent productions (a la
John Cassavetes
). If this sounds like a recipe for failure, Eustache somehow magically holds everything together magnificently. In fact, I must assume that these lengthy conversations are distilled from Eustache's own life experience, as it just seems well-neigh impossible to have created out of thin air 3 hours worth of very diverse conversations. (Eustache writes the film script himself.) I imagine that one has to spend many years to collect these from "interesting" parties filled with (pseudo) intellectuals! Often a conversation is not particularly interesting on its own, but it contributes subtly to the whole and forms a part of an engaging experience.
When this film was first screened in Cannes Film Festival in May 1973, it created some sort of scandal due to the "obscenity" and "immorality" of the contents. In spite of that, it won Grand Prix Spécial du Jury and Fipresci (International Critics) Prize. Today, 40 years later, the "scandalous scenes" are no longer so shocking. It is still relevant to us, not (only) because of its message, but mostly because it excels on purely cinematic ground. The acting from the lead performers are excellent. Léaud, in particular, outdoes himself in The 400 Blows and personifies Alexandre. However, I feel the auteur Jean Eustache is the main force behind this magnificent success.(*3) As mentioned above, the cinematography, composition and editing are unpretentious. They serve the film rather than attract attention to themselves. Each scene can stand on its own as a vignette, but the seemingly loosely organized storyline actually forms a coherent structure, leading to the climactic monologue by Veronika. It's a great loss of humanity that Eustache only made 2 feature films. (His 1974 film, Mes petites amoureuses lasts 123 minutes according to IMDB and wikipedia, although the version I watched was just under 2 hours, perhaps due to "PAL speedup".)
---
The VHS quality is, well, like what you would expect of VHS. The details, colors, contrasts leave a lot to be desired in this New Yorker Film release. I had previously emailed Criterion Collection to suggest this film, but no success so far for CC to answer my request! I hope some day a good transfer for home video formats will be available. (In fact, as far as I know, this film has only appeared once as Japanese DVD, which is unfortunately out of print.(*4) In the meantime, anyone who is interested in film should either get the VHS or take any chance to see this film when it is shown in your area. This film deserves to be watched multiple times. It reveals more depth with each re-viewing, a hallmark of a masterpiece.
Highest recommendation!
----------------
(*1) Lebrun was Eustache's former lover.
(*2) In fact, Eustache's constant "fade-out" instead of cuts could have easily infuriated the French new wave pioneers! :)
(*3) Eustache can be seen in a cameo in the supermarket scene as Gilberte's fiancé, when Alexandre's shopping cart bumps into his.
(*4) Rumor has it that Eustache's descendants are asking a prohibitively high price for the rights. However, I don't know a reliable source to confirm this.
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