(LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN, France 1973, 210 min., French/subtitles)
Often considered the last film of La Nouvelle Vague, Eustache’s intellectual epic follows young Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud) who spends his days hanging out in cafés talking, and ultimately drifts into affairs with the older Marie (Bernadette Lafont) and the younger Veronika (Françoise Lebrun).
Program Notes
Jean Eustache was first introduced to the French New Wave through his visits to the Cahiers du Cinema office. His wife was the Cahiers secretary and he increasingly spent more time there while coming to pick her up. Eustache was inspired to begin making films in the early 1960s after seeing Eric Rohmer’s Moral Tales (1963), which experimented with handheld silent film cameras. Despite Eustache’s early obscurity, big names in French cinema, such as Francois Truffaut and critic Andre Bazin, were soon applauding his semi-autobiographical shorts. Jean-Luc Godard provided film stock and produced his second film, Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (1966). In the late 1960s while living in poverty, Eustache started to make ethnographic documentaries for television. In 1973, Barbet Schroeder, a friend from the Cinematheque Francais, financed Eustache so he could spend three months scripting what would become his first feature length film, The Mother and the Whore.
The Mother and the Whore was shot in black and white with a small budget of about 700,000 francs. Despite its running time of over three and a half hours, the film was shot in only four weeks. In a refusal to “prettify” the film, Eustache used only natural sounds and shot on location in his own apartment and in cafes. And although the film has a raw documentary feel, Eustache carefully orchestrated each episode. He allowed little deviation from the 300 page script and it took him over three months to edit the film.
The film follows an unemployed aspiring intellectual, Alexandre, and his simultaneous relationships with an older independent business woman, Marie, and a promiscuous nurse, Veronika. The film deals with French society immediately following the failures of the student protests and has been regarded as central to post-1968 French cinema. As Alexandre claims, “we had the cultural revolution, the Rolling Stones, May 1968, the Black Panthers, the Palestinians, the Underground and then nothing for the last two or three years.”
More central to the film are the many dialogues entirely about sex. Dan Yakir championed the film as “a rare instance in French cinema where the battle of the sexes is portrayed not from the male point of view alone.” While Eustache’s other films are often accused of being sexist and at times misogynist, in The Mother and the Whore it is not the male, but the female characters who are independent and self-supporting. However, as Jill Forbes claims, Eustache in the end adopts the rather misanthropic view that “it is the individual’s sexual desires, whether that individual is male or female, that make him or her vulnerable to others and this is seen as a weakness.”
The film won both the special jury prize and the critics’ prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. This success allowed Eustache to raise the money to make My Little Loves (1975), a feature length autobiographical film he had been writing for years. Eustache continued making TV documentaries until 1980, when after an accident he became immobilized, rarely leaving his house. He became self-absorbed and depressed by his own marginality, and in September 1981 he shot himself.
~ John Klacsmann, Student, The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation
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