After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May ’68 came THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache that captured a disillusioned generation navigating the post-idealism 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a dalliance with the younger, sexually liberated Veronika (Françoise Lebrun, Eustache’s own former lover) — leading to a volatile open relationship marked by everyday emotional violence and subtle, but catastrophic shifts in power dynamics. Transmitting his own sex life to the screen with a startling immediacy, Eustache achieves an intimacy so deep it cuts.
“[It] closed the coffin lid on both the French student idealism of 1968 and the fragmented Nouvelle Vague… Today, this looks like either the most conservative work of radical art ever released, or the most radical work of conservative art. Either way, it's a resounding blow to the heart.” —Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (covering the Belcourt’s 2010 screening, guest-programmed at the time by Harmony Korine) “The first time I saw THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, I thought it was about Alexandre. After a viewing of the newly restored 35mm print being released for the movie's 25th anniversary, I think it is just as much about the women, and about the way that women can let a man talk endlessly about himself while they regard him like a specimen of aberrant behavior. Women keep a man like Alexandre around, I suspect, out of curiosity about what new idiocy he will next exhibit.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (Jan 22, 1999) “Directed by Jean Eustache, it has been very hard to see in recent years; the film was released here on VHS, but not until late 2021 did the rights holder, Eustache’s son Boris, agree to its restoration… It’s a self-consuming masterwork that seems to burn itself up as it passes through the projector. It’s a film of rage and self-punishment, of arrogance and humiliation and, ultimately, of ferocious irony about pleasure and power, desire and submission.” —Richard Brody, The New Yorker
