If the supposedly highly autobiographical The Mother and the Whore (La maman et la putain) is anything to go by, its writer/director Jean Eustache was a cock, a pseud and the sort of blowhard who could dish it out but not take it. A flattering portrait it is not but what’s usually considered Eustache’s best work (the Cahiers du Cinéma called it the best movie of the 1970s) is at least bracingly honest.
Or maybe not – Eustache might have been even more appalling than the smug, self-centred creature he is portrayed as here, in the astonishing performance by Jean-Pierre Léaud, on screen for every minute of three hours 35 minutes of running time. Léaud plays the antiheroic Eustache stand-in Alexandre, a young man with no visible means of support who swings, Tarzan like, from one relationship to the next, hanging on to the old one until he’s sure he has the next one in his grasp. As the story opens he’s with Marie (Bernadette Lafont), but is already making overtures to Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), an ex Alexandre is trying to woo for the second time. She’s not going back there, thanks very much, even refusing to take the bait when he offers to marry her. What more could a woman want?
So instead Alex hits on Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), a young woman he clocks at Les Deux Magots, the café haunt of Jean-Paul Sartre. Loving nothing better than the sound of his own voice, Alexandre tries to impress Veronika with cod philosophising – “When you eat a cold thing you taste the cold, not the thing” – and by namedropping Bresson, Murnau and Borges. He has a copy of Proust in his pocket and at one point seems to be on the verge of reading it.
But he’s not quite ready for Veronika, a free spirit who talks openly about the men she’s had sex with. Her story about removing a tampon so she could have sex with a medical student – before going back to work – actually provokes a rare reaction out of him. Impressed by her frank (male) attitude, he ups the relationship ante by bringing Veronika back to the place he shares with Marie, possibly hoping for a threesome, definitely trying to assert himself.
What’s on offer for Alexandre is a variation on Freud’s Madonna-Whore dichotomy – Gilberte is the former, Veronika is the latter. Alexandre desires both, though what’s actually on offer is Maria, a normal down to earth women who just wants a nice relationship with a decent man.
Even if you don’t know the films of Eustache, this one might feel familiar. Woody Allen has essentially been remaking it one way or another for decades. There’s a lot of Manhattan in here. And Bertolucci’s The Dreamers also has its roots in the character of Alexandre and his tortured relationships with women.
Léaud, catapulted to stardom while still a schoolboy in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, has appeared in films by Godard, Varda, Breillat, Pasolini, Bertolucci and Rivette. Though never a star in the way that Delon or Belmondo were, he is particularly excellent here. In a downbeat and unshowy way, dressed throughout in long cravat, shades and hipster gear, he is a humourlessly self-regarding Alexandre, a simulacrum of an intellectual and the all mouth and no trousers of the Left Bank.
Pierre Lhomme is the director of photography and shoots it all softly and subtly – no fireworks. Even so, the film was considered incendiary in its day, the idea that a woman might talk about sex in the same way that she’d discuss how she liked her coffee was too much for many – “an insult to the nation,” said Le Figaro. Le Nouvel Observateur thought the film misogynistic, which is hilariously muddle-headed. Let’s just say this again – Alexandre is not the hero here.
Is its reputation the reason why it took Criterion so long to get around to The Mother and the Whore? It got a 4K restoration in 2012, but it took until early 2025 for Criterion to get around to including it in their Collection. Whatever caused the delay, it’s here now, all three hours and 35 minutes of it, the most glorious example of the talky French movie.
The Mother and the Whore – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
