Known as the post-mortem for May ’68, the culmination and finish of the French New Wave, and one of the cinema’s most harrowing dissections of heterosexuality, Jean Eustache’s 1973 The Mother and the Whore is as much a legend as a film. The fact that his other work is virtually unknown in America has added to this film’s stature as an isolated, unrepeatable triumph. But the Harvard Film Archive’s current Eustache retrospective proves that his masterpiece didn’t come from nowhere and didn’t lead to nothing.

In The Mother and the Whore (May 16 and May 22 at 7 p.m.), Jean-Pierre Léaud (the New Wave’s key acting personality) plays Alexandre, an unemployed twentysomething intellectual who’s living off his lover, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), but becomes involved with the promiscuous Veronika (Françoise Lebrun). Shot in Paris locations (mostly cafés and apartments) in natural light and direct sound, the three-and-a-half-hour film is at once a drama of sexual jealousy, an extended study of performance styles, a document of its time and place, and a portrait of the disillusionment that followed the collapse of the utopian aspirations of 1968.

I love The Mother and the Whore; it seems to be mainly men who love the film. Do we find a paradoxical comfort in the image of male inadequacy that Eustache gives us? In watching Alexandre’s deceptions get dismantled and his fake charm get exposed, are we just lying in wait for the moment when everything magically comes back together again?

The puritanism of the film makes me uncomfortable. I think especially of Alexandre’s diatribe against abortion and Veronika’s insistence (during her gripping tirade near the end) that you should have sex only if you are in love and want to make a baby. Eustache could have questioned these points of view through Marie (the film’s most attractive character) but fails to do so — leaving himself open to the charge of being reactionary, though he was probably just trying to be abrasive. As for his revelations about the impossibility of heterosexual love, they seem to come down to this: woman, for man, is either mother or whore; men force women into these two images, and women help. To the extent that the movie can be reduced to such a discourse, it’s fairly uninteresting.

And yet The Mother and the Whore is a great film. It’s great in the disdainful purity of its technique, in the performances of its three leads, and above all in giving a definitive view of the ’70s — a lost time, a time defined by loss. The film is hopeless, but not in a way that makes it obvious why, eight years after making it, Eustache killed himself. It has a negativity and a tension equal to its period.

The Mother and the Whore is the center of Eustache’s work. Three medium-length films in the series look forward to, explain, or take off from it. His first movie, Bad Company (1963; May 13 at 7 p.m.), follows two jerks who pick up a woman, take her to a dancehall, and steal her purse. At one point, one of the men says, “Girls never understand — that’s the tragedy.” The film shares with its successor, Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (1965; on the same program), currents of bitter humor and sexual hostility. But the tonal control of the second effort represents a major step forward. A low-key Léaud narrates and stars as an impoverished idler who has no luck with women until he puts on a Santa Claus costume. Ominously defeatist, these two films show how Eustache, though drawing inspiration and courage from the New Wave, found his own world of savage and disillusioned scroungers and defined his own sardonic, troubled mood.

In A Dirty Story (1977; May 15 at 7 p.m.), a writer becomes obsessed with staring at vaginas through a hole in the door of a café lavatory. The story is told twice: once by its ostensible real-life hero under documentary-like conditions, once by an actor (Michael Lonsdale, superb as always) in a fictional narrative. Expanding on the monologue format of The Mother and the Whore, Eustache, with icy restraint, here further widens the distance between men and women that he explored in his earlier films.

Ángel Díaz’s documentary The Lost Sorrows of Jean Eustache (1997; May 14 at 7 p.m. and May 15 at 9 p.m.) concentrates on Eustache as cinematic thinker and archivist of his own life. Actors read texts written by Eustache, including the following reflection: “The role of the author in cinema should be one of non-intervention.” This sentence reminds us that he belongs to the greatest of film traditions (he cites Griffith, Renoir, Dreyer, and Lang as his models), the one that sees cinema as a matter of placing the camera in front of reality and capturing it ardently, precisely, and without tricks.

Issue Date: May 10-17, 2001