The Damaged Soul of The Mother and the Whore

The Damaged Soul of The Mother and the Whore

Jean Eustache’s famous elegy for a left-wing generation is, at its heart, reactionary.

Legendary movies are not always great ones. Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore has long been more legendary than seen. After it won the Grand Prix at Cannes when it premiered there in 1973 and was released in America to much acclaim later that year, it came close to disappearing, rarely shown in repertory theaters and, except for a VHS release in the ’90s, unavailable for home viewing. The new fiftieth-anniversary restoration is being shown in New York as part of “The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache,” a complete retrospective of the director’s work that will travel to Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver, and Seattle.

The movie’s reputation is intimidating; it has been almost universally praised as an overwhelming, excoriating experience. Read between the lines and what’s being described is an endurance test. At three hours and thirty-nine minutes, shot by Pierre Lhomme in grainy black-and-white, mostly in cramped apartments that, like the people who inhabit them, all look battered by use; with no score but direct sound that makes all the music, from rock to classical, played on cheap portable turntables, sound like someone is yelling very close to your ear; and with the characters’ endless prattle, this is not a movie made with pleasure—anyone’s pleasure—in mind.

The Mother and the Whore is about what happens to people who have lived through a moment that promised revolutionary change which failed to materialize. In this case that moment is May ’68, when French student protests spread to a nationwide general strike. In Paris, cobblestones were ripped up to form barricades for battles between protesters and police, battles that were as much sport as uprising. Within a few weeks, President De Gaulle managed to amass a coalition of votes to send the country back to the routines of work and life it had abandoned. But accounts from people who participated read like a combination of revolt and permanent holiday, a discovery of what happiness meant and how it might be attained. Put it this way: A typical revolution doesn’t come with utopian slogans like BENEATH THE PAVEMENT, THE BEACH and I DECLARE THE STATE OF PERMANENT HAPPINESS. The Situationist philosopher Guy Debord later wrote of the time as

a rediscovery of collective and individual history, an awakening to the possibility of intervening in history. . . . People looked back in amusement at the strange existence they had led a week before . . . everyone finding themselves at home everywhere . . . The occupations movement was obviously a rejection of alienated labor; it was a festival, a game, a real presence of people and of time.

Who could get over something like that?

It was Eustache’s great ambition to capture the bitterness and disappointment of an entire generation and magnify them to the level of a symphonic dirge. And it’s perhaps a suggestion of just how deeply Eustache felt that bitterness that, in Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Alexandre, he chose a fraud for his protagonist. In The Love Germ, her wonderful feminist comic novel about May ’68, the English writer Jill Neville, who was in Paris in those days, describes a character like Alexandre who “talks about a Utopia where all necessary labor will be divided. And never so much as makes a cup of tea or empties the rubbish.” Alexandre is, at thirty, still trying to get by on what you might call graduate-student charm. It still works—the only thing about him that does—on Bernadette Lafont’s Marie, the slightly older working-class woman he lives with and lives off. Alexandre spends his days hanging out at the Left Bank café Deux Magots, claiming he goes there to read, even though the turned pages of his opened volume of Proust do not noticeably increase over the course of the movie. Mostly, he listens to himself talk, peppering his conversation with references to books and movies, always ready for the minutest subject to send him off on some philosophical disquisition. It’s all a lot of balls.

Alexandre is a baby macho, using a veneer of romanticism to basically envision a world in which women exist to meet his needs. His financial dependence on Marie doesn’t stop him trying to pick up other women, and he believes he’s rejecting bourgeois mores by telling her about them. But when Marie admits to having a few nights out with a male friend, Alexandre goes into a jealous funk. It’s to Léaud’s credit that he never tries to make Alexandre ingratiating or roguishly winning. He doesn’t turn him into the bumbling Everyman that (sadly, to my mind) the later Antoine Doinel, or the young men navigating the currents of romance and political commitment in Godard’s Masculin Féminin and La Chinoise, became. Alexandre is a user and a con artist, and Léaud, quite bravely, sustains that interpretation as if he were out to destroy the good will of an audience who had watched him grow up on screen.

Marie can fend for herself. She manages a small dress shop, which affords her enough to live in a cramped apartment where a flattened-out mattress serves as a bed, a dining table, and, draped in various quilts and coverings, a place for company to sit. Eustache isn’t particularly interested in finding out why Marie, who doesn’t need him for sex or support, puts up with Alexandre. It’s even more of a question because Marie is just about the only appealing character in the movie, tall and lush with an easy, open smile and a manner that’s alternately enticing and wised-up, the same attitude that has won generations of audiences over to movie tough gals. By the time she made this film, Lafont had acquired impeccable nouvelle vague credentials, having worked with Claude Chabrol, Françoise Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Louis Malle, and Philippe Garrel. Without the connection her Marie provides to the world of work and pleasure—and the ability to just get through a damn day without an existential crisis—the movie would be even harder to sit through. But Lafont’s charisma creates the place there is for Marie in the movie, the place Eustache doesn’t create. It’s one thing for a character in Neville’s The Love Germ to ask, “Why do women without kids of my age have to pick up grubby little guttersnipes to mother?” without providing an answer. It’s quite another for Eustache not to even consider the question. Marie is the mother of the title and, for Eustache, that explains her role.

He’s more interested in the whore, Françoise Lebrun’s Veronika, the impoverished Polish nurse Alexandre fixates on as she works her way into his and Marie’s bed. When Lebrun appeared in The Mother and the Whore, she was a student relatively new to film acting, but she had recently been involved with Eustache, and it’s said that he based Veronika and Alexandre’s relationship on his with her. The title would have been more honest if it had been The Mother and the Holy Whore, because Veronika is meant to serve as the movie’s damaged soul, suffering for our sexual sins. Lebrun doesn’t have the actors’ skill of Léaud or Lafont. She has the slack face of a depressive Madonna and she drags everything down around her. Veronika’s dormitory garret is a bare penitent’s cell. She wears her hair in a Swiss Miss braid and mopes through the movie in black shawls and shapeless black dresses that look as though she’s discovered the only shop on the Left Bank that caters to Sicilian widows.

Veronika claims to be open to whoever wants to use her sexually, and she spends what little money she earns hanging out at clubs and bars for the purpose of picking up a man for the night. She professes to not feel much besides the need for sexual company and whatever meager pleasure she can find in her one-night stands. But in the movie’s scheme, Veronika is another veteran of a revolution that failed to materialize: the sexual revolution. It all comes out late in the movie when, drunk and miserable, she shows up at Alexandre and Marie’s place in the wee hours and embarks on a monologue that, at some point, begins to feel like the scene in the first Austin Powers movie when Austin is brought out of cryogenic deep freeze and has a morning pee that goes on and on and on. Only here, while you’re amazed at how long the scene continues, you’re too benumbed to laugh. During her weepy marathon Veronika decries that women who seek the same sexual pleasure as men are regarded as whores. But she also says a couple is not really a couple unless they produce a child.

You might allow someone in such emotional extremis some self-contradiction. But a director who produced a three-hundred-page script, which he did not allow his actors to deviate from by one word, certainly had time to clarify his meanings. And I think what Eustache is selling here is the old conservative crock about the emptiness of sexual freedom and the need for the sustaining foundation of family.

It’s no shock that anyone who embarks on a life of sexual freedom runs the risk of at some point feeling used, of wanting something solid instead of temporary. But Veronika assumes that the right to act freely is a guarantee of happiness; when that freedom doesn’t pan out, the freedom is a lie. This is a movie in which women who choose sexual freedom end up tormented, and a man who gets a woman pregnant is honor bound to marry her—even when the movie shows us that’s setting up a horror show of emotional dependence and bondage. What The Mother and the Whore ultimately expresses is, as Joan Didion wrote sharply of the women’s movement in 1972, an “aversion to adult sexual life itself.”

I realize it might seem strange to write that the most famous movie elegy for a left-wing generation is, at heart, conservative, even reactionary. But why else would Eustache make an epic film about an entire generation’s political disappointment and choose as his protagonist a phony and a bloviator instead of someone who worked to realize revolutionary change only to see it snatched away? I think it’s because Eustache thought it was all an illusion. Better to have never believed, even if that makes you a bastard like Alexandre, than to have believed and been let down.

I realize too that there is genuine anguish in this movie, anguish that some feel was confirmed by Eustache’s suicide in 1981. (And the suicide of the film’s costume designer, Catherine Garnier, whom Eustache was also involved with, on whom he based the character of Marie, and whose apartment serves as Marie’s in the film. She killed herself a few days after seeing its first screening.) But despite that and despite the film’s reputation as a raw, devastating experience, raw is exactly what it isn’t. Yes, Eustache stripped the movie of all sensual pleasure, made sure its characters were not easily likable, directed its long scenes to allow for the slackness and boredom of real life. And that may make it popular with the current crop of young male critics who approach their job in such a dour, donnish manner they don’t seem to actually enjoy movies. But it’s all so deliberate that it becomes as easy to resist as the Hollywood manipulations it intends to avoid.

Movies don’t have to be ingratiating; they can resist worn-out conventions and the falseness of easy resolutions. But at some level, people who don’t like artifice don’t like art. I have never understood filmmakers who choose to work in a form where the truth is so often found via illusion and yet feel that only by scrubbing out every bit of aesthetic pleasure, by distrusting pleasure itself, can you be honest. That’s not the mark of an artist—it’s the mark of a monk who’s wandered into the wrong profession. It’s even worse for Eustache, who grew out of the nouvelle vague, with its delight and play, its willingness, even eagerness, to exult in sensual joy and luxuriate in romantic melancholy. That tradition was still going strong in the ’70s. The year after The Mother and the Whore was released, Jacques Rivette would make Céline and Julie Go Boating, as playful as any great movie ever made and one that subverts the conventions of storytelling even while reveling in it. Two years later François Truffaut would make perhaps his greatest film, The Story of Adele H., a scalding picture about the mad freedom to be found amidst the bondage of romantic obsession. Next to these, Eustache’s movie looks not just timid but self-absorbed.

For all its heaviness, The Mother and the Whore is surprisingly easy to shake off. It’s not a work to be engaged with but a monument to self-flagellation before which we are to prostrate ourselves. It is not a dismissible movie in any sense, and it is totally uncompromised. But it’s as exasperating and unlikable as a major work can be. You watch the misery of the characters, their superiority to the merest comforts, the almost-squalor they simply accept, and you think that it explains all the radicals who give up their convictions for a bourgeois life, who turn right wing. And it makes the prospect seem like not such a bad idea.

Charles Taylor is the author of Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American ’70s. His writings can be found at the Substack “Crackers in Bed.” He lives in New York.