Director/writer: Jean Eustache
Photography: Pierre Lhomme
Editors: Denise de Casabianca, Jean Eustache
Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Francoise Lebrun, Bernadette Lafont, Isabelle Weingarten, Jacques Renard, Jean Eustache
For practically everyone involved in The Mother and the Whore, certainly director and writer Jean Eustache (who committed suicide in 1981), Paris May 1968 was obviously a critically formative time and place to be alive, aware, and active, whether politically motivated or otherwise. The events of that time are rarely referred to even passingly in this overlong movie of three and a half hours, but they shadow everything. Or something does—a sense of profound shared experience, even a devastating one, lies back of everything witnessed in this picture, which alternates blindly, like a beast, between public and private spheres, with a common mode of abject failure.
Is it important to share feelings about that time and place, or even to know and understand them? I don't think so. I saw The Mother and the Whore first in 1975, knowing very little of its background and sources, and it completely thrilled me. It appeared then like nothing so much as a very odd (and charming) epic of desultory chat and small-scale relationship hiccups, which is what it remains at its best. It only unfolds and opens from there. The more you know about the historical context the more appeal it has, perhaps, but it remains alluring and resolutely human, as in the good-humored way it keeps showing how profound the inconsequential points we make in conversation are. But the conversational points are not what's important. The connection is. And here we see, the modern condition, characters attempting again and again to connect, and failing.
So many things about The Mother and the Whore are paradoxical and counterintuitive, underscoring the profound inability of connection at its heart. Set in Paris in the early '70s, it is shot in a muddy black and white, its images often swamped and effaced by darkness, stark and almost forbidding. There is no music except when people play their records—yet these moments, when we see people turning specifically to music for pleasure and solace, are among its most powerful. The great bulk of the movie takes place either on a mattress on the floor in the apartment shared by two characters or in various café settings. Not very much happens at all, though people are continually talking and smoking and drinking and eating and talking some more.
The picture focuses on Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a younger man kept by an older woman, Marie (Bernadette Lafont). Their relationship is more or less "open," a status accepted without question by one and all (vestiges of the era). It embeds like food lodged in the throat a certain level of mistrust and not unrelated manipulations in the relationship. At the beginning of the picture Alexandre is acting the part of a heartbreak victim (the role seems familiar to him), thrown over by Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), who aborts his baby and finds another man before the next semester starts. Alexandre spies Veronika (Francoise Lebrun) in a café and picks her up, beginning a pointless affair with her.
The Mother and the Whore is set at an interesting and very brief point in modern Western history, shortly after a good deal of the anti-imperialist energy of the '60s in Europe had dissipated but shortly before feminism had become a powerful social force. Thus, somewhat surprisingly (to me), Alexandre and his friends are easily recognizable as chauvinist pigs, making no apologies for it—indeed, making excuses for it, in terms of perceived threats to their naturally superior masculinity.
Alexandre is, in fact, a fatuous idiot, as shown in one scene early in Marie's apartment where she complains, as she is doing the dishes, that he never helps with the dishes. This leads him to a soliloquy on the rewards of honest labor such as doing dishes, connecting it with the authentic proletarian experience (meanwhile not budging an inch to help with the dishes). Marie is exasperated but as she listens to him go on finally has to laugh at him. His stupidity is unthreatening and charming to her, and he has won her over again, though without quite knowing how.
In many ways, the cast is the class of European art film at the time, starting with Leaud, already the staple by then of important films of the '60s by Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. At this point in his career—with appearances here and in Day for Night and Last Tango in Paris—Leaud had about entirely transformed himself into some iconic saint of art cinema, always the character who wants to go to the movies, who talks about movies constantly, who forever smokes cigarettes and compares events in life to scenes in movies. In the first hour of this picture he name-checks Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Bresson, F.W. Murnau, and Nicholas Ray. Playing opposite him, Bernadette Lafont is as gloweringly warm and beautiful as she has ever been. Francoise Lebrun is enigmatic and gnomic, her beautiful round face beaming out of a slightly stooped and figureless form wrapped in shawls or bedsheets.
At this point in the lives of the characters of The Mother and the Whore, especially Alexandre, sexual revolution is all they have left—political revolution did not work out. So the three of them—Alexandre, Marie, and Veronika, i.e., the mother and the whore—proceed, and so proceeds the movie, through predictable jealousies, declarations of love, envenomed spats, groping for the edges and the limits for definition. But the edges and the limits keep receding and there is no definition. So life. There is only the next conversation and the next café date and the next night and bed and lover. Eventually all three end up in bed together, none of them any happier for it and a good deal more miserable.
I'm acting like the plot is the point here and in some ways it is. The downward trajectory of the fantasist revolutions, moving from the public sphere of politics into the private one of sex, with the same results, is much the point, and the story illustrates it well. But the best and truest moments in the movie are when it's closest to human experience—showing men and women who want to be adored, want what's fair and right for all, want what's easiest. They reject the conventional but never forget its promises. They want to feel superior, secure, loved, free from anxiety. They want the things they can never have, except by luck or single-minded dedication to one that excludes all the other things they want too.
Top 20 of 1973
1. Scenes From a Marriage
2. The Mother and the Whore
3. Don't Look Now
4. Mean Streets
5. Badlands
6. Sisters
7. The Last Detail
8. The Wicker Man
9. Save the Tiger
10. The Exorcist
11. Day for Night
12. A Touch of Class
13. F for Fake
14. High Plains Drifter
15. O Lucky Man!
16. American Graffiti
17. The Long Goodbye
18. The Spirit of the Beehive
19. Serpico
20. Enter the Dragon
No comments:
Post a Comment