The Mother and the Whore (1973)

#4: The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973)

I first encountered this long, slow, drab, confounding, and utterly engrossing four-hour last gasp of the French New Wave on its U.S. release circa 1975. It was formative in its way—I was barely out of adolescence. I went to it with a bunch of people with whom I shared a house and we all spent the next few weeks smoking Galouise and Gitane cigarettes like Jean-Pierre Leaud and his pals and women. Of course the themes and subtexts were over our heads—what was 1968 to us but ancient history already? But the desultory, dissipated lives that it reports on so talkily seemed at once fascinating, seductively appealing, and a kind of promise of a road we could well find ourselves on one day ourselves. Not exactly a cautionary tale, more like a preview of one version of adult life.

I've had similar reactions every time I've seen it since, though I've long since given up cigarettes of any brand, French or otherwise. I dread seeing it every time on some level for its punishing length (217 minutes). My back aches and my butt hurts from the kinds of seats found in the theaters that show it. But once started, there's virtually no going back. One time I noticed shortly before I was planning on going to bed that it was on a cable channel—unusual in itself. My girlfriend at the time had never seen it, never even heard of it. "Let's watch a little bit of this," I said. "We can turn it off when we get tired." We watched all of it.


What happens? Jean-Pierre Leaud plays a role typical of him across much of his career, from The 400 Blows to Irma Vep, as a Parisian ne'er-do-well who loves cinema beyond reason. He's more or less radicalized in this version, but also exhausted. The events of 1968 came and went and nothing changed for him, or the world. So the de facto business of his life has devolved down to women and living well, or as well as he can with little or no income. He has a woman, a bit older than him, with whom he lives—she is more or less "the mother." In the course of the picture he meets a Polish woman who works as a nurse and is casual in her attitudes about sex: "the whore." Events proceed. A kind of climax is reached as an attempt is made to sort out the terms of these relationships. But it's messy and confusing, and at the end you don't particularly get the sense it's the end of anything. Only that you've seen the contours of Leaud's life from that point forward, and that the movie may as well stop as continue.

Director Jean Eustache, never a noticeably major figure, committed suicide in 1981, and The Mother and the Whore has all but receded into a semi-official obscurity—there's an out-of-print VHS set and still only speculation and vague promises of a DVD. That makes it something of my Greil Marcus pick here, for which my apologies. I managed to obtain a bootleg and cut a couple of representative clips from it, at the links below. I also found the whole thing on YouTube if you're up for that. Or if anyone really wants to chase this down I'm happy to share contact information for my source. He operates out of the UK, is reasonably priced (especially on bulk orders), and has a fairly large catalog. Just let me know by email (cantxplain@gmail.com).

"It's good. It doesn't burn at all. I can drink half a bottle easy."

"Not having money is no reason to eat badly."

See on YouTube starting here.

Phil #4: Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) (scroll down)
Steven #4: Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)

Merry Christmas, everybody! There's still time to see this holiday classic on Christmas Day itself if you start watching now using the YouTube link above.