The Mother and the Whore

As a record of a kind of everyday Parisian life, the film is superb. We think of the cafes of Paris as hotbeds of fiery philosophical debate, but more often, I imagine, they are just like this: people talking, flirting, posing, drinking, smoking, telling the truth and lying, while waiting to see if real life will ever begin. Read full review

The film is at once of its time--simultaneously the fullest flowering of the French New Wave and the shattering of its male chauvinist tendencies--and utterly timeless in its perception of love, sex and human nature. Read full review

It’s a historical marker in a way that few other films are — not only the nail in the coffin of the French New Wave and one of the strongest statements about the aftermath of the failed French revolution of May 1968, but also a definitive expression of the closing in of Western culture after the end of the era generally known as the 60s. Read full review

Jean Eustache obliquely puts on trail the self-reflexive cool of the early New Wave films. Read full review

As in the best films of John Cassavetes, The Mother And The Whore transcends the medium of film altogether and appears to capture life as it is lived, in all its messy, painful, infinite sadness. Read full review

The trio’s breezy erotic sophistication masks an urban populism that’s as artistically fertile as it is politically risky; their domestic disasters have the feel and tone of epic clashes. Read full review

It is a searing, painful, revealing, egotistical, irritating, often beautiful document that captures, in orgies of sexual gorging and verbal disgorging, the clash, among people of a certain generation and milieu, between Left Bank libertinism and an astonishingly deep conservatism--deep, because it is mystical rather than political, and based on matters of life and death rather than left and right. [04 Apr 1974, p.90]

A major work, not because of its exhausting length (217 minutes) or the audacity, brilliance, and total originality of its language, but because of writer-editor-director Jean Eustache’s breathtaking honesty and accuracy in portraying the sexual and intellectual mores of its era. Read full review

The three-and-a-half-hour-long movie revels in talk as this man ponders life, philosophy, the sexual revolution, the workers' revolution, love, death, and so on. He smokes, drinks, flirts, and talks –­ and the movie is exquisitely of its time. Read full review

Eustache's screenplay is specifically set against the backdrop of the failed student revolts of the late 1960s, and occasionally the sight of Leaud in bellbottoms makes it look like a time capsule. Yet the moods, the emotions, the debates seem profoundly contemporary. Read full review

For anyone who wants to see pure cinema, it should be an experience both wrenching and inspiring. [22 Jan 1999, p.H]

Disassembling and reassembling his blighted lovers in various moods and stances, Eustache achieves a fine perspective — detached but never dispassionate. Read full review

The Mother and the Whore is an icy comment on the New Wave, informed throughout by Eustache's striking visual intelligence. Read full review

THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE captures a sense of realism rare in any type of film, bringing us deep beneath the surface of the characters' exteriors. Read full review

The movie is long, and here and there it seems to meander. But when it arrives at its anguished last scene, there's no doubt that Eustache knew where he was heading all along. Read full review

It probes the attitudes of French men and women toward love, sex, and promiscuity through the story of a self-centered intellectual who strays from his middle-class girlfriend to pursue a nurse with unconventional ideas about relationships. Jean-Pierre Leaud gives one of the most memorable performances in his remarkable career. [19 Dec 1997, p.13]

Eustache's method resembles the static randomness of the Warhol-Morrissey pictures, but the randomness here is not a matter of indifference; it's a conscious goal.

Watching The Mother and the Whore, you find that you're back in the movie-sludge of the nineteen-fifties, when a number of mediocre French films focused on sub-Sagan characters: numb, semi-paralyzed creatures who hardly had the calories to drag themselves through the day. Read full review