SCREENING IN THE BERNARD OSHER FOUNDATION AUDITORIUM
“It’s the great post-1968 movie… [O]verwhelming in its length… and in its emotional intensity – it’s a self-consuming masterwork that seems to burn itself up as it passes through the projector.”
220 minutes. Not Rated. Directed by Jean Eustache. In French with English subtitles.
“Best Film of the 1970s,” Cahiers du cinéma.
After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May ’68 came The Mother and the Whore, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache that captured a disillusioned generation navigating the post-idealism 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless, Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a dalliance with the younger, sexually liberated Veronika (Françoise Lebrun, Eustache’s own former lover), leading to a volatile open relationship marked by everyday emotional violence and subtle but catastrophic shifts in power dynamics. Transmitting his own sex life to the screen with a startling immediacy, Eustache achieves an intimacy so deep it cuts.