Real life fiction: The mother and the whore

I’ve been an enthusiast for French cinema for a long time, so I decided to follow my own recommendations at https://phillipkay.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/50-french-films/ and re-view some favourites (listed below). For those who know anything about French films it’s a truncated list, without the films I haven’t seen, or seen but didn’t like. It’s like all such lists in that respect.

Probably the hardest of these films to get to grips with is Jean Eustache’s La maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore) of 1973. It’s been out of print for years while copyright owners fight for terms with the media companies wanting to release it (but check out YouTube, https://youtu.be/gFHn4xPeW14). Many critics think it among the greatest French films ever made, but others loathe it: IMDB gives it an 8.0. I can see where both groups are coming from.

For a start, it’s one of the impossible films, films that should not work, like The Seventh Seal, or My Dinner with Andre. It’s 217m long, almost all a series of conversations the central character has with friends and lovers, and was shot in black and white photography over a two month period on a shoestring budget, with the location most often Eustache’s apartment.

But it does work, largely due to Eustache’s film script. This is a series of about 50 conversations held by Alexandre, the central character, with lovers past, present and future, and friends. Like the film print, the script is OOP, but one can be made by downloading a subtitle file (English in my case), converting it to a text file, and formatting it with scene details and characters’ names. Even in translation the script is a work of art.

Those who think dialogue is non cinematic, or even that drama is non cinematic, should try reading and viewing almost any play/film by Tennessee Williams, another maverick. Eustache’s script, surely a great work of literature, is by turn insightful, revealing, profound, trivial, touching and mundane, Like much great art, its content convinces the reader/viewer it has happened to them.

Jean Eustache

Eustache’s films all seem autobiographical (all works of art are in some way: ie, authentic), but in Eustache’s case he drew directly on the events of his own life. La maman and la putain has as well a documentary style throughout. It would seem autobiographical in a direct way, but it’s not. The material Eustache uses he has shaped to give it a more enduring significance.

Here one might recall Wordsworth’s comment: “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”. The events in the film overtook Eustache: his girlfriend left him after an argument over abortion, he met and moved in with an older woman who supported him, and who committed suicide when he abandoned her for someone else, a free, very promiscuous woman. The act of writing then making a film enabled Eustache to see this in perspective, and to give his ideas on the motives of the people concerned. His script, and film, is poetry in Wordsworth’s sense. Watching the film is a moving experience for those who have some idea of what Eustache is talking about.

Jean-Pierre Léaud

The documentary style of the film includes the presentation of its actors, filmed in close-up as though speaking to the viewer, or classic alternate head shots as they speak to one another. The actors act in a natural, non dramatic style. The central character, the Eustache like figure, is Alexandre, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud. His foils are Marie, the woman who supports him, played by Bernadette Lafont, and Veronika, the girl he might fall for, played by Françoise Lebrun. These women by the way are not the mother and the whore of the film’s title. That’s how Alexandre sees them, but if we can’t see behind Alexandre’s rhetoric by the end of the film we haven’t been paying attention. Léaud and Lafont were well known to French cinema goers as New Wave stars, but Lebrun had acted in only two films before. She had been, though, Eustache’s lover, and her rejection of him inspired the making of the film.

Here is where the film script is so important. Although the actors’ delivery appears improvisational, they are in fact following the script exactly, even Lebrun, down to drink orders and bad jokes. Just as Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson appear to be acting out events in Bergman’s and Ullmann’s relationship in Scenes from a Marriage but are actually performing in a drama of much wider significance, so it is with Eustache’s film.

This disciplined reuse of personal experience to throw light on human behaviour worked to Eustache’s disadvantage. Although supported by producers such as Barbet Schroeder (producer of Eric Rohmer’s films) and Bob Rafelson (Jack Nicholson’s buddy) for La maman et la putain, this was not enough to make many further productions possible. Branded an uncommercial film maker, at best a maker of idiosyncratic documentaries, Eustache made only two features before languishing in television for eight years. In 1981 he committed suicide. Almost immediately he was proclaimed a major film maker, a fate similar to another misfit, Vincent Van Gogh.

Bernadette Lafont

What I see in La maman et la putain is that the three main characters are all excessive. Alexandre is excessively self protective; Marie is excessively kind; and Veronika is excessive about sex. These excesses earn them mistrust, exploitation and contempt respectively: their behaviour causes them the problems they complain of.

One of the merits of the script is that it shows, for instance, Alexandre’s mistrust (defensive monolog) as based on the failure of the May 1968 revolution, while also indicating this stance is as well a pretense to protect someone who has had his feelings hurt, his love rejected. This becomes clear after the midpoint of the film (after debunking Sartre) when Alexandre opens up to Veronika and tells her how he feels: he’s still protective, but it’s a start. All three main characters have a speech which is a tour de force, all three in the last third of the film. Alexandre admits he was wrong, but does so too late; Marie at last loses her temper, but ineffectively, as she has a relationship at risk; and Veronika speaks up for women to have the same sexual freedom as men, but can be little more than petulant in the face of male exploitation. Definitely tragicomic, all three. Touching, but absurd. As we are.

Françoise Lebrun

We have the first half of the film to know the characters, to look under their rhetoric, to know that most of what they say is not real, especially about others. If we don’t or can’t do that we won’t like the film much.

You could say all three have too much surface, as does Alexandre’s university friend the wheelchair thief or the girl who has murdered the pretend priest. It’s the battle the French fight between the fiery outer Voltaire and the inner responsive Rousseau.

In the end Eustache has been proved right. By making this film he distanced himself from what must have been traumatic events. Tragedy becomes tragicomedy, which relates it to the lives of others (though some critics would stab you behind an arras for using such terms). And the film is outside time, as you always see the same events (or hear the same conversations) each time you view it, allowing you to enrich what you hear and see with your added experiences.

Note: Here is an early review of mine (2009): https://phillipkay.wordpress.com/2009/06/27/the-mother-and-the-whore/, and another by well known critic Jonathan Rosenbaum: https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2018/08/the-way-we-are-2/.

Here are the films I listed under ‘Classic’:

L’appartement

La haine

Nelly et M Arnaud

Un coeur en hiver

La Crise

Jésus de Montréal

37˚2 le matin

La maman et la putain

Ma nuit chez Maude

L’Inde fantôme