I think there are two essential
questions raised by director Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (1973).
The first is a matter of form, and the second is a matter of content. Is it possible to make an interesting movie
about boring people? That’s first and foremost. Reviewers asked this question upon the film’s
release, and those who weren’t stymied by its three and a half hour runtime
found that indeed such a feat was attainable.
The trick is in the writing and the casting. So often, movies are about people who appear
to be boring realizing their potential and becoming great. This picture is about how tedious and
unexciting it is to appear interesting while never actually realizing any
potential whatsoever.
In Eustache’s mind no actor could better
convey this paradox than Jean-Pierre Léaud, Truffaut’s reliable alter-ego. In this role, written specifically for him by
Eustache, he breaks free of the confines of Antoine Doinel, but he never really
leaves him behind. He is Alexandre, a self-centered pseudo
intellectual whose “busy” life seems evenly divided between sleeping,
pretending to read in cafes, and picking up women. He lives with a woman, Marie (Bernadette
Lafont), but he treats her badly, never willing to commit to their relationship. He’s fixated on an old flame, and as the film
opens he gets out of bed with Marie to arrange to meet his former lover.
When she rejects him, he doesn’t seem
particularly upset. After all, there are
still plenty of hours in the day. He
drinks and smokes with a friend and discusses his favorite banal topics, all
the while hoping to meet another potential conquest. Eventually she materializes in the form of
Veronika, played by Eustache’s own former lover Françoise Lebrun. Though at first Alexandre is tepid in his
pursuit, his interest is peaked when he begins to realize that she is just as
adept, and perhaps even better, at the game of sexual musical chairs.
He begins an affair with Veronika,
making only what appear to be intentionally poor attempts to hide it from
Marie. When she discovers the romance,
she’s marginally hurt but even less surprised.
She and Alexandre fight, but nothing comes of it. In writing, Eustache was clever enough to
realize that the audience that would accept this film wasn’t interested in major
changes, and for that matter, neither are Alexandre and Marie. She claims to love him, as does Veronika, but
I don’t recall him ever declaring love for her.
I was compelled to wonder why she didn’t kick him out—after all, it is
her apartment he sleeps at—like any decent woman would, but was then reminded
by the film’s title that neither of the women Alexandre is interested in is
particularly decent. To him, women
really only have two functions.
While ultimately Eustache is able to
generate sympathy for his female characters, even as they both remain sexually subservient
to Alexandre, their actions rarely seem justified. Despite his evident loafer status, Marie is
always willing to take her boyfriend back, and even warms to Veronika when it
becomes clear that she isn’t going away.
The three form a love triangle that is wholly beneficial to none of the
parties, and yet are temporarily content to remain sexually available but
emotionally distant from each other.
These characters lead the type of
lives that sound interesting, but are in actuality tremendously without excitement. They sometimes seem to fight simply because
there isn’t anything else to do when they are tired of sex. This unfortunately begins to feel formulaic in
a 212 minute film. Yes, it has its
interesting moments, but they are more often generated through the subtle but
growing distances we sense between the characters than by any scenes of sex or
violent outbursts. Alexandre (perhaps in
an extension of Doinel) sometimes comments that these events remind him of a
bad movie, and it’s difficult to tell whether Eustache is being ironic.
He based this film on events from
his own life, which leads me to wonder whether he and his characters are
self-centered, or just his movie is. It
is a picture comprised of three and a half hours of conversations that ultimately
add up to very little having been discussed.
Yes, this is an interesting movie about particularly boring people, but
I don’t know whether that ultimately means that the people are boring, or that
sex is. This leads to the second question
the film raises. Was the sexual
revolution really all that revolutionary?
Alexandre would likely claim that it was, but he’s simply using women’s
lib and sexual liberation as his excuse to get laid. He is, in effect, a chauvinist of the truest
form, and so immature that he can’t even conceive of a different way to perceive
women.
Language:
French
Runtime:
212 Minutes
Available
@Youtube.com
Grade:
2.5 Hats Off
0 comments:
Post a Comment