THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE Movie Review
La Maman et la Putain
Arriving on the international film scene in 1973 amid a glut of self-indulgent films about student unrest, Jean Eustache's epic was mistaken in some quarters as just one more of those, especially since the young man at its center—played by Jean-Pierre Léaud in his prime—is perhaps the screen's ultimate self-indulgent student. Comfortably ensconced in a womb-like, self-contained Paris, completely obsessed with himself and his own (as he sees it) intelligence, Léaud lords over his little domain by practicing the sexual freedom he espouses while at the same time demanding fidelity from the woman he lives with (Bernadette Lafont). Toss in the film's three-hour-and-forty-minute running time, which is almost entirely taken up by alternately passionate and disingenuous conversation between the three principals (the third being Françoise Lebrun, the new woman Léaud brings home, whose astonishing, furious tirade takes up the last half-hour of the picture), and The Mother and the Whore became an easy target for those anxious to shoot down subtitled toy ducks. But look out, because The Mother and the Whore is so utterly engaging, so blazingly honest and indelible, that it in no way appears to be a period piece a quarter-century after its release. Recent, real-life political events are simply additional proof that sexual politics in a male-dominated society rarely budge an inch from where they started, regardless of the amount of passionate lip service (pardon the expression) that men in positions of power care to pay. Recently remastered from the film's original negative and fitted with much-needed new subtitles (the original prints kept huge chunks of conversation a secret from non-French-speaking audiences, giving us subtitles that periodically read “untranslatable French pun”!), The Mother and the Whore is fresher than ever—one of the most essential films to emerge from the French New Wave.
NEXT STOP … Rules of the Game, La Belle Noiseuse, Masculine Feminine
1973 210m/B Bernadette LaFont, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Isabelle Weingarten, Francoise Lebrun, Jean-Noel Picq, Jessa Darrieux, Genevieve Mnich, Marinka Matuszewski; D: Jean Eustache; W: Jean Eustache; C: Pierre Lhomme. NYR