La maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore) // Jean Eustache //Â 1973
November 5, 2009
The Mother and the Whore is a raw, unsentimental, and incisive slice-of-life exposition into the demoralization, deflated euphoria, and pervasive rootlessness of the May 68 generation (a period marked by widespread student protests and worker strikes throughout France) in the wake of the failed counterculture revolution. Jean Eustache employs high contrast black and white, medium framing and close-ups, spare (almost squalid) interiors, and natural milieu to create an atmosphere of visually distilled, organic hyperreality that reflect the profound desolation, ambivalent direction, and meaningless rituals that define the unresolved emotional and psychological states of Alexandre, Veronika, and Marie. However, in contrast to the figuratively transcendent images of manual labor in Bresson’s minimalist and dedramatized cinema, Eustache’s illustration of physical activity is inherently inert, self-destructive, and escapist: experimental drug use, intimations of suicide (that sadly presages the filmmaker’s own cause of death in 1981), and Veronika and Marie’s passive, almost autonomic response to Alexandre’s initiations of sex serve as transitory surrogates to the actual process of human existence and true intimacy. Moreover, interpersonal communication is reduced to vacuous, distended conversations (or more appropriately, monologues by the self-consumed Alexandre) that similarly devalue human connection to impressive, but ultimately meaningless words. In the end, it is this underlying emptiness that the filmmaker exposes through Alexandre’s moribund, pleasure-seeking, existential limbo: the trauma of a generation struggling to come to terms with profound change, cultural alienation, and the collapse of a once seemingly attainable ideal. –strictly film school
Time-traveling can be demoralizing — when you’re going in reverse. Watching “The Mother and the Whore,†you find that you’re back in the movie-sludge of the nineteen-fifties, when a number of mediocre French films focused on sub-Sagan characters: numb, semi-paralyzed creatures who hardly had the calories to drag themselves through the day. Then, boredom was a hip disease—and it all comes rushing down the spout of memory when Jean-Pierre Léaud explains that he lives “in a world where people are old at 17.†Jean Eustache’s picture, which was shown last night at the New York Film Festival, is so reminiscent of those mossy productions that you start wondering if nothing has been learned about movies, about acting, about men and women. The discoveries of the last decade have been erased. Or else the sixties never happened: you were just hallucinating.
All in all, it’s tempting to mail the director a list of complaints as long as his movie. What possessed him to use slow dissolves when we yearn for quick cuts? Or to give us a tour of the inside of a refrigerator or lessons in putting records on turntables or how to make a call? And occasionally, when Eustache builds toward a scene that might be almost interesting—in which these weary people might have to cope with one another — he leaves it out. The program notes report that he “now hates most films.†So this picture may be his vengeance on the apes who like them. But perhaps he was paying homage to Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, who had “a radical theory†that “boredom in the arts can be, under the right circumstances, dull.†–Nora Sayre, The New York Times
>>buy it on VHS<<Â (no dvd exists)
or
get it from megaupload, part 1 & part2
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