The Mother and the Whore

Nowhere is the malaise and pessimism of post-1968 Paris, when the revolution was lost, mined so deeply as in Jean Eustache's 1973 classic, The Mother and the Whore, which is being revived for the first time since its original release, and in a new, full-length, 215-minute print.

Eustache begins by shredding the 1960s French New Wave: actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, the icon of exuberant French youth for his seminal roles in Truffaut and Godard treasures (The 400 Blows, Stolen Kisses, Masculine/Feminine), resurfaces here, a sour few years older, as Alexandre, a charmless, skirt-chasing, 1970s freeloader. Terminally unemployed, he reads Proust, listens to Weimar-era records, and hangs out with a dubious, heavy-drinking, nameless friend (actor Jacques Renard) who devours books about the SS. Although cursing "women's lib," Alexandre spends his days prowling cafés for women to fall for intensely, to talk at interminably, to obsess about night and day, and occasionally to fuck.

The sex talk, and there's lots of it, is astonishingly frank for 1973, and there's nudity. But the actual sex is offputting (the first screw results in a pushed-in Tampax) or estranged (a threesome that never quite happens because someone always resists, or attempts suicide).

As for the title, the classic male-defined female schism isn't so clear. Is Alexandre's 30ish live-in mistress, Marie (the wonderful Bernadette Lafont), the symbolic "mother" because she's the one waiting home for the film's psychologically arrested protagonist? Is his new girlfriend, Veronika (the Anaïs Nin-like Françoise Lebrun), a promiscuous nurse, the "whore"? It's Veronika, after all, who in the film's most passionate soliloquy expresses pity instead for those who (like herself) have fucked themselves silly and declares that sex with true love is the only thing worthwhile, sex between lovers who are trying to have a baby.

Is Veronika mouthing Eustache's secretly conservative, spiritual, sacramental message? Hardly. When an actual pregnancy is announced, a promise of marriage is followed by acute vomiting. A bleak postscript to this avowedly anti-transcendent film: Jean Eustache committed suicide in 1981. At the Brattle this Friday and Saturday, April 3 and 4.

-- Gerald Peary