The Mother and the Whore (1973)
"La maman et la putain" (original title)
210 min
Director: Jean Eustache
Writer: Jean Eustache (scenario and dialogue)
Stars: Bernadette Lafont, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Françoise Lebrun
Country: France
Language: French
Eustache's 210 minutes long masterpiece moves its wheels through the ambiguous and ambivalent life roads of three youths in Paris during 1972. Film is based on real life incidents of director; his broke up with actress Françoise Lebrun, his life with Catherine Garnier and his love for Marinka Matuszewski. As Eustache described the project, "I wrote this script because I loved a woman who left me. I wanted her to act in a film I had written. I never had the occasion, during the years that we spent together, to have her act in my films, because at that time I didn't make fiction films and it didn't even occur to me that she could act. I wrote this film for her and for Leaud; if they had refused to play in it, I wouldn't have written it."
Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a foppish French intellect is living with his lover Marie (Bernadette Lafont), who is in her 30's. Film starts with Alexandre waiting for his ex-lover Gillbert in a street and trying to convince her about his love and persuade her to marry him.While rambling he sees a young nurse, Veronka (Françoise Lebrun) in Deux Magots cafe and stating a relation with her. Through unimportant places and dialogues Eustache is expanding the collisions among the three humans.
Events in the movie are happening in Post-May68 Paris. The life of all Parisians became peaceful and they forgot the failed revolution of 68 by joining hands with mediocrity. 60's were a period of great turbulence all over the Europe and West. A counterculture developed in America against American conspiracy and their economical support to Vietnam War. "So in some respects it might be argued that France's version of the counterculture and what it eventually produced was a few steps behind what was happening in North America--and maybe even more than a few steps when it comes to women's rights." (Jonathan Rosenbaum). Veronika is so sassy and her freedom of being herself gives her courage to do sex in open space. Even though we cant place this movie a feminist one. Film reaches is height with Veronika's lamenting monologue that there s no whore, when we consider freedom and the plaque of society over her- "a whore". What separates a mother from a whore is simply freedom.
Eushache says that the character Alexandre is "destroying [the three lead characters], but he is looking for it all along. After his voyage into madness and depression, he ends up alone. That's when I stop the film."
We can see traces of Freudian Psychosexual developmental stages in the relationships. Alexandre dont want his lover Marie (we can personify her to the word mother) to love/admire any other fellow as his Phallic stage is clearly revealed here. Marie is the "mother" here since he is financially backed by her and she is not so ardently bothered by his affairs with other women unlike him. His activities are pretty rookie in front of Marie and not stained by reality principle. But he cant deter Veronika with his circumlocutious words and sometimes he seemed to be upset when she denoting her freedom of choice between men and her promiscuity. His dialougues with Veronika gives us an idea of his Genital stage where he is forced to consider the reality.
The movie created scandals among viewers due to its high profanity and sex talks.It won the Grand Prix of the Jury and the FIPRESCI prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival.
"My subject is the way in which important actions situate themselves in a continuum of innocuous ones". Jean Eustache committed suicide in 1981.
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