THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (1973)
7:00 PM, Thursday April 27
Premiere: Introduced by David Roe
Randwick Ritz
Director: Jean Eustache
Country: France
Year: 1973
Runtime: 215 minutes
Rating: U15+
Language: French, English subtitles
TICKETS ⟶
Premiere: Introduced by David Roe
Randwick Ritz
Director: Jean Eustache
Country: France
Year: 1973
Runtime: 215 minutes
Rating: U15+
Language: French, English subtitles
TICKETS ⟶
AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE OF THE 4K RESTORATION
"I'd heard it was a classic of French cinema, but I wasn't exactly thrilled at a three-hour-thirty-five minute foreign language film that reportedly consisted of little more than people sitting around talking. Little did I know that I was in for one of the most memorable cinematic experiences of my life." — Andrew Johnson, Time Out New York
Widely regarded as the film that marked the end of the French New Wave, Jean Eustache’s opus is a ruthless examination of sexual politics inside a ménage à trois, and played out in tiny apartments and Parisian bistros in Saint-Germain-des-Près. The three characters are graduates of the May ’68 cultural revolution and their mating habits and dialogues are filled with confessions and monologues ranging from the sexual, to the humorous and the provocative. A completely unique masterpiece. Cinema Reborn presents the Australian premiere of the new 4K restoration.
“Best film of the 1970s.” — Cahiers du Cinéma
“An insult to the nation.” — Le Figaro
“A self-consuming masterwork that seems to burn itself up as it passes through the projector.” — The New Yorker
Introduced by David Roe, who has been making and marketing films since the 1970s. His own productions include The Coca-Cola Kid (MGM) and Storyville (Sony). David was the original Australian distributor of The Mother and the Whore.
"I'd heard it was a classic of French cinema, but I wasn't exactly thrilled at a three-hour-thirty-five minute foreign language film that reportedly consisted of little more than people sitting around talking. Little did I know that I was in for one of the most memorable cinematic experiences of my life." — Andrew Johnson, Time Out New York
Widely regarded as the film that marked the end of the French New Wave, Jean Eustache’s opus is a ruthless examination of sexual politics inside a ménage à trois, and played out in tiny apartments and Parisian bistros in Saint-Germain-des-Près. The three characters are graduates of the May ’68 cultural revolution and their mating habits and dialogues are filled with confessions and monologues ranging from the sexual, to the humorous and the provocative. A completely unique masterpiece. Cinema Reborn presents the Australian premiere of the new 4K restoration.
“Best film of the 1970s.” — Cahiers du Cinéma
“An insult to the nation.” — Le Figaro
“A self-consuming masterwork that seems to burn itself up as it passes through the projector.” — The New Yorker
Introduced by David Roe, who has been making and marketing films since the 1970s. His own productions include The Coca-Cola Kid (MGM) and Storyville (Sony). David was the original Australian distributor of The Mother and the Whore.
FILM NOTES
By Janice Tong
Jean Eustache
Jean Eustache
Jean Eustache has largely been an elusive figure of cinema; the scant availability of his films and his premature death afforded a cultish aura around this auteur. Even though his films drew deeply from an autobiographical root, and you are immediately plunged into his world when you watch one of the 15 films made during his 15 year career. His aura, nonetheless, remains intact and opaque. His films, however, come to tell a cohesive story of observation and despair.
Eustache was an autodidact. Born in 1938 in Pessac to a working class family; he was first brought up by his maternal grandmother, Odette Robert, who was also the subject of his film Numero Zero (there are two versions of this film, the shorter version at 50 mins is simply named Odette Robert), and at 13 years of age, he moved in with his mother at Narbonne. It was here where he gave up further schooling and gained an apprenticeship to become a certified electrician. His film Mes Petites Amoureuses/My Little Loves (1974) was a look back on this period of his life.
His love of films started at a young age; when Eustache moved to Paris in 1957, he frequented the Cinémathèque Française on weekends. He especially adored Pagnol and Renoir. It's true to say that Eustache was delivered into the Nouvelle Vague esprit when it was in full swing. His wife, Jeanne Delos, worked as secretary at Cahiers du cinema at the time. Eustache moved easily into that circle, mixing with Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Jean Douchet and Jean-Pierre Léaud amongst others.
Upon going to Rohmer’s shoot of La Boulangère de Monceau (1963) he felt this experience brought him a step closer to the world of film. With the help of Paul Vecchiali, Eustache was able to make his first short film La Soirée (unfinished) in the same year. This was followed in rapid succession by Les Mauvaises Fréquentations | Robinson’s Place (1964) and Le père Noël a les yeux bleus (1966), the latter film was made using the film remnants from Godard’s Masculine Feminine (1966) and marked his first collaboration with Jean-Pierre Léaud. During these early years, Eustache also worked as an editor for Rivette and others, sometimes making uncredited guest appearances in films including Godard’s Weekend (1967) and later in Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974).
Eustache was quick to develop his own style. His documentaries took on a Wiseman-esque approach, bearing witness by neither glorifying nor intervening. Over the next seven or eight years, with as many films made, these stories poured out of him, as though he was a medium, a vessel. The French film critic, Serge Daney, called Eustache’s oeuvre a “film-river” – and this river took a course away from traditional narratives or documentaries. Eustache directed almost a film a year until his death in 1981.
His shooting style was very different to the norm; largely due to the sparse resources and lack of finance available to him, he shot both Le Cochon and La Rosière de Pessac in a day. Although he was meticulous in his preparation, to produce a one hour documentary from a single day’s shoot was not easy and Eustache found this way of working to be increasingly perilous. When he finally arrived at La Maman et la Putain, regarded by Eustache as his first true feature film, he felt there was a lot to say about his situation.
The film’s working title was Du Pain et des Rolls or Bread and Rolls, but during the shoot and in post-production, Eustache felt a “shift” occurring – of something else taking over; “an invasive, omnipresent character” overshadowing the protagonist’s presence. He felt that Alexandre (his mouth-piece) became increasingly “frail and dependent” to this other force, Lebrun’s.
This film was inspired by his fractured real-life relationships with three women: his failed union with Catherine Garnier, his breakup with Françoise Lebrun, and his love for Marinka Matuszewski. This web became more intriguing and tangled onscreen, mixing reality with fiction: Bernadette Lafont plays Marie, the character that Garnier is based upon; Isabelle Weingarten embodying the character Lebrun inspired, Gilberte; and finally, (I’m assuming) Veronika’s character, played by Lebrun is based on Marinka Matuszewski.
Having put his life on screen, Eustache also suffered the consequences – his ex-lover Catherine Garnier, (not only was she Marie on screen, she additionally worked on the costumes for the film) committed suicide after watching a screening of the film (some believed her mother’s recent death was also a trigger), leaving a note for Eustache that read, “The film is sublime. Leave it as it is.”
Eustache frequently said in interviews that he needed the distance of history to protect himself in his films, and his next autobiographical feature (and also his last), Mes Petites Amoureuses, was infinitely more free and lyrical, most notably through an absence of dialogue.
Throughout his life, Eustache suffered greatly from depression, the tragedy of life that was his source material became weighted and suffocating. It exsanguinated him. He described it as a kind of vampirism: “I sucked my own blood.” Whilst his desire for cinema was what held the wolves at bay, a contradictory force – of not having to make another film again, was just as strong. These irreconcilable differences tore him up.
After he broke his leg holidaying in Greece, he became depressed and reclusive upon learning that he would never be rid of his limp. Having locked himself in his Paris apartment for days on end, he finally shot himself in the heart with a revolver after a long phone conversation with Alix Clio-Roubaud on the 5 November 1981. Alix was a photographer and wife of the writer, mathematician and Oulipo poet Jacques Roubaud, as well as the subject of Eustache’s last short film Les photos d'Alix, together with Eustache’s son, Boris. It is an intelligent and enigmatic cinematic essay. Eustache had pinned a note to the door of his room, “Frappez fort. Comme pour réveiller un mort”, “Knock hard. As if to wake the dead.”
The Film
To describe a film that is near to four
hours in length and filled almost entirely with dialogue would be an impossible
task; at best, it’d be a living simulacrum like that of Borges short story On the Exactitude of Science where the
art of cartography grew to such exacting magnitude that the map of the Empire
came to be the size of the Empire, covering it from edge to edge, and rendering
the map itself useless.
More succinctly, Eustache’s La Maman et La Putain can perhaps be best described as a lament, a rhapsody on the word ‘fuck’. It is spectral cinema at its core – haunting us, even as we watch it unfold…no one can escape its melancholic take on relationships, life and sexual politics: a worldview through the micro-cosmos of Eustache’s own life at that particular point in time.
No wonder he described it as a film that he “detests”, because for him, it is a film without history, where the distance of time protects those who reveal their hidden selves. Here, the narrative is fuelled by the pain of his impotence: his inability to obtain funding for his films, despite their success and good reviews and also of his devastated love life, despite his taking many lovers. La Maman et La Putain is both raw and eloquent, it is a tale of a man twice failed, questioning the world into which he has been cast.
Eustache’s shorts and documentaries up until that period have been successful, much lauded by other filmmakers. He had received favourable reviews from critics, but his funding came only from Godard and ORTF for his documentaries. Increasingly frustrated by this contradictory space he found himself in, Eustache began writing a response in his fury. This became an outpouring of dialogue, or rather, monologues, without any shot structures that “piled up every day to form the basis of a colossal film running 5-6 hours.”
The film follows Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), an idle Parisian intellectual who is living with, or squatting with, his latest lover, Marie (Bernadette Lafont). Alexandre is adrift – literally, drifting through life as he does girlfriends, and through the streets of Paris too – around the Left Bank on Boulevard Saint Germain, hanging out with friends or to read in cafés like the Flore or Les Deux Magots – in this latter space, conjuring up its band of artistic and writerly patrons: Verlaine, Rimbaud, Camus, Hemingway, Breton, Sartre and Beauvoir to name but a few. It is also the milieux in which he meets with his latest potential love interest, Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), a Polish-French nurse.
The story unfolds in words. Eustache made it known that every single word heard had been scripted – in fact, he had memorised the script in its entirety; to make sure the actors stuck to every single syllable that was written. Although at times, the monologues seem meandering, excessive and paradoxical; they imbibe with a sense of truthfulness and banality that casts a strange and almost hallucinatory power over us. Absorbing and repellent; neither the ménage à trois nor the camera gives way to action at any point. Eustache’s chamber piece, this strange trio of Léaud, Lafont, and Lebrun, comes to consume the inhabitants of the film as well as the viewers. We are confronted with what Lafont calls “dialogue on fire”, it’s searing content is without sentimentality and scorches those who stay to watch: we are left with more than afterimages as the film builds to its finale - Lebrun’s 10 minute monologue – the entire length of a 16mm reel.
Lebrun’s Veronika hypnotises us with her harsh voice and inflexible countenance – hunched over in her black shawl. It’s hard to imagine that this was only her third film – her performance was astonishing: intimate and morose; and outshone Léaud’s manufactured presence. He seemed to be out of kilter to the rhythms of Lafont and Lebrun; but in rhythm with his own fabricated existence as ‘actor’. Aptly described by Truffaut, who said of Léaud to be “an anti-documentary actor”, in that he only has “to say ‘good morning’ and we find ourselves tipping over into fiction.”
On set, Léaud found it difficult to memorise the lengthy dialogue (he had the most words) and the pressure of getting every precise detail correct gave a peculiar energy to his performance, one that added to the texture of the film. For Lebrun’s final 10 minute piece to camera, she had the script on her lap if she needed it, she didn’t – the first take was used.
Launched at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, the film was divisive from the start. The fact that it won the Grand Prix did not prevent it from a stormy reception. Ingrid Bergman, the President of the Jury that year let it be known that she found it “regrettable that France saw it fit to be represented by these two films” (the other was La Grande Bouffe), which she deemed as “the most sordid and vulgar of the Festival.” Its initial 1973 theatrical release was only to an audience of 343,000.
Because the camera never looks away, time stretches. The trio come to be your friends for the duration. You are attentive to their whims and react viscerally to their decisions or indecisions; their very disposition makes you respond in a very guttural way.
In an interview, Eustache commented on how films are frequently reduced to 1 or 1½ hours in duration, with some exceptions; epic or grand films could go for 3-4 hours, “but why can’t an intimate film also be grand or be as long?” And this is true of his masterpiece. As the film had not been in ready circulation on DVD, nor shown in the theatres – in fact, it has been rarely seen beyond the small screen of one’s computer. La Maman et la Putain had been, for me, the perfect bedroom cinema, and Eustache: a bedroom auteur.
So, who is the ‘mother’ and who is the ‘whore’? Even without Eustache’s intense exploration into sexual politics of the time, we should come to know that there is no mother, just as there is no whore. Instead, on screen are “the lost children of May ‘68”, who have now grown older, and perhaps more disenchanted, it is Eustache who was able to give them a voice – and for this voice to be carried through to the present; and rightfully on the big screen.
The Eustache milieux is not necessarily a happy one, but it aims to tell it as it is, and only of the things he loves: “women, dandyism, Paris, the country and the French language”, as explicated by Serge Daney in his tribute to Eustache. There is indeed an aura around Eustache, our patron saint of the text of fire and the guardian of our melancholies of love.
More succinctly, Eustache’s La Maman et La Putain can perhaps be best described as a lament, a rhapsody on the word ‘fuck’. It is spectral cinema at its core – haunting us, even as we watch it unfold…no one can escape its melancholic take on relationships, life and sexual politics: a worldview through the micro-cosmos of Eustache’s own life at that particular point in time.
No wonder he described it as a film that he “detests”, because for him, it is a film without history, where the distance of time protects those who reveal their hidden selves. Here, the narrative is fuelled by the pain of his impotence: his inability to obtain funding for his films, despite their success and good reviews and also of his devastated love life, despite his taking many lovers. La Maman et La Putain is both raw and eloquent, it is a tale of a man twice failed, questioning the world into which he has been cast.
Eustache’s shorts and documentaries up until that period have been successful, much lauded by other filmmakers. He had received favourable reviews from critics, but his funding came only from Godard and ORTF for his documentaries. Increasingly frustrated by this contradictory space he found himself in, Eustache began writing a response in his fury. This became an outpouring of dialogue, or rather, monologues, without any shot structures that “piled up every day to form the basis of a colossal film running 5-6 hours.”
The film follows Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), an idle Parisian intellectual who is living with, or squatting with, his latest lover, Marie (Bernadette Lafont). Alexandre is adrift – literally, drifting through life as he does girlfriends, and through the streets of Paris too – around the Left Bank on Boulevard Saint Germain, hanging out with friends or to read in cafés like the Flore or Les Deux Magots – in this latter space, conjuring up its band of artistic and writerly patrons: Verlaine, Rimbaud, Camus, Hemingway, Breton, Sartre and Beauvoir to name but a few. It is also the milieux in which he meets with his latest potential love interest, Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), a Polish-French nurse.
The story unfolds in words. Eustache made it known that every single word heard had been scripted – in fact, he had memorised the script in its entirety; to make sure the actors stuck to every single syllable that was written. Although at times, the monologues seem meandering, excessive and paradoxical; they imbibe with a sense of truthfulness and banality that casts a strange and almost hallucinatory power over us. Absorbing and repellent; neither the ménage à trois nor the camera gives way to action at any point. Eustache’s chamber piece, this strange trio of Léaud, Lafont, and Lebrun, comes to consume the inhabitants of the film as well as the viewers. We are confronted with what Lafont calls “dialogue on fire”, it’s searing content is without sentimentality and scorches those who stay to watch: we are left with more than afterimages as the film builds to its finale - Lebrun’s 10 minute monologue – the entire length of a 16mm reel.
Lebrun’s Veronika hypnotises us with her harsh voice and inflexible countenance – hunched over in her black shawl. It’s hard to imagine that this was only her third film – her performance was astonishing: intimate and morose; and outshone Léaud’s manufactured presence. He seemed to be out of kilter to the rhythms of Lafont and Lebrun; but in rhythm with his own fabricated existence as ‘actor’. Aptly described by Truffaut, who said of Léaud to be “an anti-documentary actor”, in that he only has “to say ‘good morning’ and we find ourselves tipping over into fiction.”
On set, Léaud found it difficult to memorise the lengthy dialogue (he had the most words) and the pressure of getting every precise detail correct gave a peculiar energy to his performance, one that added to the texture of the film. For Lebrun’s final 10 minute piece to camera, she had the script on her lap if she needed it, she didn’t – the first take was used.
Launched at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, the film was divisive from the start. The fact that it won the Grand Prix did not prevent it from a stormy reception. Ingrid Bergman, the President of the Jury that year let it be known that she found it “regrettable that France saw it fit to be represented by these two films” (the other was La Grande Bouffe), which she deemed as “the most sordid and vulgar of the Festival.” Its initial 1973 theatrical release was only to an audience of 343,000.
Because the camera never looks away, time stretches. The trio come to be your friends for the duration. You are attentive to their whims and react viscerally to their decisions or indecisions; their very disposition makes you respond in a very guttural way.
In an interview, Eustache commented on how films are frequently reduced to 1 or 1½ hours in duration, with some exceptions; epic or grand films could go for 3-4 hours, “but why can’t an intimate film also be grand or be as long?” And this is true of his masterpiece. As the film had not been in ready circulation on DVD, nor shown in the theatres – in fact, it has been rarely seen beyond the small screen of one’s computer. La Maman et la Putain had been, for me, the perfect bedroom cinema, and Eustache: a bedroom auteur.
So, who is the ‘mother’ and who is the ‘whore’? Even without Eustache’s intense exploration into sexual politics of the time, we should come to know that there is no mother, just as there is no whore. Instead, on screen are “the lost children of May ‘68”, who have now grown older, and perhaps more disenchanted, it is Eustache who was able to give them a voice – and for this voice to be carried through to the present; and rightfully on the big screen.
The Eustache milieux is not necessarily a happy one, but it aims to tell it as it is, and only of the things he loves: “women, dandyism, Paris, the country and the French language”, as explicated by Serge Daney in his tribute to Eustache. There is indeed an aura around Eustache, our patron saint of the text of fire and the guardian of our melancholies of love.
The Restoration
The rights to La Maman et La Putain were held by the family for almost 50 years,
and only recently released by Boris Eustache to Les Films du Losange for this
new restoration.
La Maman et La Putain was restored and remastered in 4K in 2022 by Les Films du Losange with the support of CNC and the participation of La Cinémathèque suisse and Chanel. Image restoration by L’Immagine Ritrovata/Éclair Classics, supervised by Jacques Besse and Boris Eustache (Jean Eustache’s son), with sound restoration by Léon Rousseau-L.E. Diapason and a Janus Films release. To launch the restoration of this rarely-seen film, it was screened as part of the Cannes Film Festival in 2022 as part of the Cannes Classics selection on May 17 and then previewed in Paris on June 2 at the MK2 Odéon to a full house. June 8 marked the film’s theatrical release, with 60 prints distributed across France. A special screening was also held at the Lincoln Centre in NYC in October, with an introduction by Françoise Lebrun and Q&A session with restoration producer Charles Gillibert.
La Maman et La Putain was restored and remastered in 4K in 2022 by Les Films du Losange with the support of CNC and the participation of La Cinémathèque suisse and Chanel. Image restoration by L’Immagine Ritrovata/Éclair Classics, supervised by Jacques Besse and Boris Eustache (Jean Eustache’s son), with sound restoration by Léon Rousseau-L.E. Diapason and a Janus Films release. To launch the restoration of this rarely-seen film, it was screened as part of the Cannes Film Festival in 2022 as part of the Cannes Classics selection on May 17 and then previewed in Paris on June 2 at the MK2 Odéon to a full house. June 8 marked the film’s theatrical release, with 60 prints distributed across France. A special screening was also held at the Lincoln Centre in NYC in October, with an introduction by Françoise Lebrun and Q&A session with restoration producer Charles Gillibert.
Credits
La maman et la putain | Director: Jean EUSTACHE | France | 1973
| 210 mins. | 4K Flat DCP (orig. 35mm, 1.37:1) | B&W | Mono Sd. | French
with Eng. Subtitles | U/C15+.
Production Companies: Elite Films, Ciné Qua Non, Les Films du Losange, Simar Films, V.M. Productions | Producer: Pierre COTTRELL | Script: Jean EUSTACHE | Photography: Pierre LHOMME | Editors: Denise DE CASABIANCA, Jean EUSTACHE | Sound: Nara KOLLERY, Paul LAINÉ, Jean-Pierre RUH | Costumes: Catherine GARDINER.
Cast: Jean-Pierre LÉAUD (‘Alexandre’), Bernadette LAFONT (‘Marie’), Françoise LEBRUN (‘Veronika’), Isabelle WEINGARTEN (‘Gilberte’), Jacques RENARD (‘Alexandre’s Friend’), [Jean DOUCHET (‘Man in Café de Flore’), uncredited], [Jean-Claude BIETTE, (Man in Café dux Magots’), uncredited], [Bernard EISENSCHITZ (‘Gilbert’s Husband’), uncredited], [André TÉCHINÉ (‘Man in Café deux Magots’), uncredited], [Caroline LOEB (‘Girl reading newspaper’), uncredited].
Production Companies: Elite Films, Ciné Qua Non, Les Films du Losange, Simar Films, V.M. Productions | Producer: Pierre COTTRELL | Script: Jean EUSTACHE | Photography: Pierre LHOMME | Editors: Denise DE CASABIANCA, Jean EUSTACHE | Sound: Nara KOLLERY, Paul LAINÉ, Jean-Pierre RUH | Costumes: Catherine GARDINER.
Cast: Jean-Pierre LÉAUD (‘Alexandre’), Bernadette LAFONT (‘Marie’), Françoise LEBRUN (‘Veronika’), Isabelle WEINGARTEN (‘Gilberte’), Jacques RENARD (‘Alexandre’s Friend’), [Jean DOUCHET (‘Man in Café de Flore’), uncredited], [Jean-Claude BIETTE, (Man in Café dux Magots’), uncredited], [Bernard EISENSCHITZ (‘Gilbert’s Husband’), uncredited], [André TÉCHINÉ (‘Man in Café deux Magots’), uncredited], [Caroline LOEB (‘Girl reading newspaper’), uncredited].