Sometimes, you think you know all there is to know about classic cinema, and then someone like the cinephiles at Janus Films reminds you there are still so many hidden gems to rediscover. While not as well-known as the French New Wave icons like Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, etc., French filmmaker Jean Eustache is still a key figure in the history of the Nouvelle Vague. His 1973 film, “The Mother and the Whore,” is considered an essential work of post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema work, and Janus Films is re-releasing the film this summer. The new 4K restoration of the film opens at Film at Lincoln Center on June 23. The film will be followed by “The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache, “A Comprehensive Jean Eustache Retrospective” starting July 7 at Film At Lincoln Center (presumably, other major cities with arthouse rep theaters will get this retrospective too, fingers crossed).
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Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont, and Françoise Lebrun, Dave Kehr, then of the New York Daily News, often a New York Times writer now, described the film as “maddening and brilliant, confessional and slyly elusive, insistently perverse and blissfully naïve.” The film centers on the chauvinist Alexandre (Léaud), who balances relationships with several women, including the maternal Marie and the sexually liberated Veronika, in the post-1968 intellectual scene of Paris.
“The Mother And The Whore” was called the best film of the 1970s by Cahiers du Cinéma, and it won the Grand Prix of the Jury and the FIPRESCI prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival.
Here’s the official synopsis:
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.
“The Mother And The Whore” opens June 23 at Film At Lincoln Center in New York, and hopefully, the re-release will hit your city later this summer too. Watch the new restoration trailer below.