Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9781567301618
Format: Black & White
ISBN: 1567301614
Label: New Yorker Films
Languages: Array
Manufacturer: New Yorker Films
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: New Yorker Films
Release Date: 1999-04-13
Running Time: 215
Studio: New Yorker Films
Theatrical Release Date: 1973

Customer Rating:
Summary: Hope and despair
Comment: I am watching 'La maman et la putain', I think for the third or fourth time. I don't want to say it's a 'great' film, because the only sure meaning of great is big: I prefer to say it's a true film.

It's the story of lost souls. Should there be an afterlife it will have a heaven and a hell, but it will also have a city of lost souls. And, you know, heaven will be sparsely populated, hell will be almost empty (the ultimate punishment) but the city of lost souls will be crowded, that's where most of us will be (already are?).

The film tells of some almost meaningless events in the life of three characters who, by chance, have interacted with each other in the Paris of the 1970s. They've all long since ceased to ask for meaning, even the delusional meaning of love. The film starts and ends with a proposal of marriage, and both proposals are robbed of their conventional purpose, standing for something else entirely which it takes the whole film to explain. Two women, Veronika and Marie, have the defense of sex; the man, Alexandre, has the defense of rhetoric. A woman's rhetoric turns sex into love: a man's emotional needs turn despair into philosophy. In an amusing scene towards the middle of the film the men see Sartre in a café and theorise his philosophy is devised to obscure the fact he's a drunkard.

Jean Eustache, one of cinema's most extraordinary film makers, was neglected in his lifetime. He was too extraordinary. In a moment of frustration, after being immobilised for months following an accident, he took his own life, long before he could realise his promise of being a major film maker. And so he became one of his own characters, like the girl with the bandaged hand who has murdered her lover, a pretended priest, and complains to Alexandre of the jealousy of her current lover.

'The mother and the whore' might seem a feminist's point of view on the roles men assign to women (you know them: virgin, mother, whore, sybil). What woman doesn't feel frustrated with the choice when she's, damn it, only a woman and just like a man she only wants someone to love. But the three main characters, and many of the minor ones, are painted warts and all. The film is broader in scope than feminism, for it embraces despair. This is a condition far more prevalent in men.

For anyone who has watched Jean-Pierre Leaud in the charming and utterly frivolous films of François Truffaut (who was the author of the unrealistic 'auteur' theory of film making), his performance in this film is a revelation. Here is exactly the same persona, the same mannerisms, given a touch of profundity by a kind of existential honesty quite foreign to Truffaut. Perhaps stardom helped Leaud to reach this state, this elevation of the image and neglect of its content. Bernadette Lafont has a number of great roles in her repertoire; she gives a powerful performance. The surprise is Françoise Lebrun, playing Veronika. Lebrun hadn't acted before; her performance has to be seen to be believed. The magician here is surely Eustache. His script and his direction must have touched something deep within his actors. The film pulls no punches; it is an honest film. And who isn't disturbed and frightened by honesty?

The story is that events and anecdote in the film come straight from Eustache's life. He had an affair with Lebrun, who left him. He wanted to tell this story, with Lebrun and Leaud in the parts. He said that without their involvement the film would not have been made. Every inconsequential happening and statement in the film is based on fact. This is the source of its achievement and yet completely irrelevant.

What is relevant is that this story of people who have lost something important and can't remember what it is can mean something to all of us in the same sorry state. After all, a world without meaning can be endured, with the help of sex, alcohol, television, the internet. Merely to depict this state would be only sentimental. Eustache does more. Just as Gilgamesh battled death futilely yet achieved immortality, 'The mother and the whore' shows us that confronting despair with honesty gives hope. The characters in the film don't feel this: the viewers do.

Eustache was a documentary film maker, as Kieslowski was, and the Kieslowski of 'Dekalog' is a useful comparison. Where Kieslowski looks at the morality of despair, how to function honestly in a life where we don't know the rules of the game, Eustache in this film is taking things a step further, looking at how we behave when we lose our faith. After all, most causes are subverted. Alexandre has seen the student movement of '68 fizzle out, a devastating blow to him, and his generation. He's seen the Black Panther movement become just a news story (people just a few years ago would have seen the same thing happen with punk, hip-hop, rap).

Veronika has a speech towards the end of 'The mother and the whore' that viewers are not likely to forget. Sex is how she gets by, and all the accumulated resentment she has comes forth in a tirade that has the bitter pathos of a little girl in a tantrum explaining why she wants an ice cream NOW.

Three and a half hours of epigrammatic French conversation in black and white photography might sound as stimulating to most as internet pornography. The only suggestion I can make is that you pay attention to what the characters do NOT say. And you can only do this by referring the spoken and unspoken conversation to your own life. As Samuel Becket makes one of his characters say: "I can't go on: I must go on". None of us has any choice at all. Our free will consists only of accepting or ignoring this.

A very moving love story, magnificently acted and directed with power and great originality. The story of a man who can only love the shattered mirror images of a woman and who has no idea of the reflection's original. And a story, rare in cinema, of the painful process of living. I would rate it as a masterpiece.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Mother and the Whore
Comment: Although the item was a Cannes film festival winner and difficult to find it was a bit disappointing. The story line itself was a bit drawn out and bizarre, very risque and racy for its time. I was disappointed with the condition in which it arrived. Advertised as almost pristine same, arrived in a very much used condition. Shipping a bit slower than most other items received from Amazon vendors. Overall, it was ok/mediocre rating and transaction.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Overwhelming
Comment: Ok, what more can I add to the comments already given in the reviews? Besides the fact that one could write a whole book about the richness and diversity of this film, not much, if one has only a few lines to express the joy and wonder, the lust for life one can get from spending a few hours watching a movie.
I saw the film the second time in my life today in the cinema, and while it hadn't the same impact as the first, whith such a fílm this hasn't much to say.
One of the greatest film of all times, by all means try and see it if you ever get a chance!
And to see more of the greatness of Eustache, watch his second feature "Mes petites amoureuses", which is as good as "the mother and the whore" but has on top of that one of the best camerawork I have seen on screen (by Nestor Almendros).
Eustache's films should really be better known, but so should be the films of lots of other great directors (e.g. Sarunas Bartas, Ken McMullen), and I'm happy, that at least one of his films is available on Video.
Hopefully there will be some DVD editions in the future, so that a broader audience will have access to these gems.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The sixtie's sexual revolution.
Comment: This is a film about three promiscuous people looking for every opportunity to have sex, without any qualms of conscience or fear of Aids. It makes you quite envious. Marie, who is living with and supporting Alexandra, doesn't complain about and senses no danger in these peripheral affairs; she has a firm believe in the soundness of their core relationship.

As Alexandra is walking past a cafe one day constantly on the look-out, he catches the eye of Veronika and decides that she will be his next adventure. Without a moments hesitation he chases after her as she leaves the cafe and says, "I haven't time to go for a drink at the moment but will you give me your telephone number?" She does, and from that moment Marie finds herself with some serious competition. At first she is so sure of Alexandria's love that she is even willing to allow Veronika to share their bed! Only later does she have misgivings and pangs of jealousy.

Veronika is far from being your wholesome girl-next door, she too is addicted to sex and offhandedly mentions that she has been with a great many men in the five years since her 20th birthday. Being a nurse she says makes it easy for her.

Alexandra is an idle, narcissistic, garrulous intellectual who will spout his ideas to anyone willing to listen. He has that much in common with Veronika; both have long scenes in which they talk in close-up directly to the camera. Because of this and because there are so many of these scenes and the film is so long, you have a real sense of getting to know the characters. There is one long scene in which nothing happens at all but which didn't bore me for a moment. Marie, alone, puts on a long-playing record and then lies on the mattress on the floor in her sparsely furnished shambles of a bed-sit and we listen with her to the whole of one long track of music. Apart from lifting her hand to her face at one point she does nothing and yet we feel sympathy for her and feel we know her better at the end of it.

Such uneventful scenes are a characteristic of French films and are what make them seem so realistic and true to life. They seem realistic because in real life we do listen for long periods to others talking, and we do listen to music with others in silence, and because we are with these people as we are with friends in real-life. Thus the length of the film is a positive advantage. I recommend it.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: brilliant (8/10)
Comment: first off, let me start off by defining my rating system so you can get a grasp on how brilliant this film is. There is only one film that i consider amazing (9/10) and that is Full Metal Jacket. there are a handful of others clustered at 8, but it is a very selected few (i.e., LaStrata, Persona, apaclopyse now)

why is this movie so brilliant? well, for starters, it has something that most foreign films, as well as movies in general, lack -- origionalliy. No, this film is not like the other foreign films that you have seen that rant on about harsh childhoods under a catholic upbringing and how everything depresses them (although those can be interesting).

The movie is the story of a person feeling towards love, and how a person's grasp on love continues to change.

if you find yourself going to the video store every week trying to find a movie with anwesers, this is the movie that you have been waiting to stumble apon.

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