The Mother and the Whore
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Mother and the Whore (French La maman et la putain) is a 1973 French film directed by Jean Eustache. It is one of the most typical French films of the 1970s and an extended essay on the Madonna-whore complex.
Plot
Clocking in at over 3½ hours, this marathon drama focuses on three twentysomething Parisians in a bizarre love triangle: Alexandre Jean-Pierre Léaud is a seemingly unemployed narcissist involved with both a live-in girlfriend Bernadette Lafont and a Polish nurse Françoise Lebrun whom he picked up at a café and with whom he begins a desultory affair. The film focuses less on plot than on the confused and ambivalent interrelations of these three lost souls.
The film has a style seemingly borrowed from cinéma vérité and it tries to capture real life in post-May 1968 France. A typical scene is one where Marie comes home, puts a record on the turntable and listens to it in real time. It was preceded by a similar 1969 American film called Coming Apart.
