The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain)

The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) is Jean Eustache's 1973 feature, widely counted among the defining works of post-New Wave French cinema. Shot in black and white and running 3 hours 40 minutes, this drama turns talk itself into the plot: its characters argue about love, relationships, men and women with near desperation. It screened at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix. Critics were divided on release, but later opinion shifted; Cahiers du cinéma named it the most important French film of the 1970s.

The story unfolds in Paris in the wake of May 1968. We meet Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a philosophically inclined idler who spends his days drinking in cafés and talking literature and cinema. He lives in an open arrangement with Marie (Bernadette Lafont), which both partners knowingly accept. After meeting a young nurse, Véronika (Françoise Lebrun), at a café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, he drifts between the two women, and eventually he must choose.

Eustache wrote the screenplay from his own relationships and filmed it between May and July 1972. It was his first feature, generally regarded as his masterpiece. Its success let him finally put his second feature, Mes petites amoureuses (1974), into production.