La Maman et la putain (1973)
Directed by Jean Eustache

Film Review

One of the last great flourishes of the French New Wave, La Maman et la putain is the most important film from director Jean Eustache, a potent and absorbing work featuring three very different characters with very contrasting approaches to life and love. Truthful, intelligent, sometimes witty, it is an engaging film which evokes the essence of Nouvelle Vague cinema, with all its poetry, daring and honesty. The fact that Eustache should choose to kill himself less than a decade after making this film adds a dark and sorrowful footnote to what is by any standards a masterpiece.

The film features two much-loved icons of the French New Wave: Jean-Pierre Léaud - best known as Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut's Les 400 coups (1959) - and Bernadette Lafont, who went wild in another Truffaut film, Une belle fille comme moi (1972). The trio is completed by Françoise Lebrun, an actress associated with some of France's most committed auteur filmmakers - she worked with Marguerite Duras on India Song (1975), Paul Vecchiali on En haut des marches (1983) and André Téchiné on Souvenirs d'en France (1975).

Léaud is perfect casting for the role of the cultivated layabout Alexandre, endlessly spouting empty philosophical discourses as if his life depended on it (this is what happens if you work too often with Jean-Luc Godard).  Bernadette Lafont is Alexandre's bouncy sugar-mummy, giving a terrific performance that alternates between bruised tenderness and fiery jealousy.  In contrast to her two charismatic co-stars, Françoise Lebrun is far more understated, and consequently more enigmatic - she looks like a fugitive from an Ingmar Bergman film.

Lebrun's character Veronika at first resembles the ideal partner - demure, charming and generous. But then we begin to see her frustration with her far from idyllic predicament. As the film develops, she develops a complex dual personality - a woman looking for a stable relationship with a committed husband in one instance, then a drunken slut out for some gratuitous hedonism in the next. (Bergman's Persona (1966) may conceivably have been an influence on Eustache when he made this film.) At least Marie, Alexandre's other lover, is more consistent, demanding though she is.  Alexandre's inability to choose between the two women is explored with depth, humour and pathos and ultimately encapsulates a fundamental dichotomy in human relationships - the need for fulfilment through passion set against an equal need for stability through commitment and parenthood. Jean Eustache made one other notable film after this, the equally perceptive Mes petites amoureuses (1974).

Film Synopsis

Alexandre is an unemployed intellectual who, having no money of his own, sponges off his lover, Marie, with whom he lives.  A devotee of classical music and existentialist philosophy, Alexandre spends his days lost in thought or engaged in philosophical discussion with his long-haired student friends.  One day, he meets up with a former girlfriend, Gilberte, and asks if she will marry him.  When she refuses, Alexandre turns his attention to another girl, a stranger, whom he sees sitting alone in a café.  When they meet up subsequently, the girl, Veronika, takes a liking to the talkative young philosopher, and it is a short while before they are in bed together.  When Alexandre's other lover, Marie, finds out, she is angry, but still attaches herself to her toy-boy.  Soon, Alexandre discovers that he has fallen in love with two women, both of whom are deeply in love with him, and both of whom are jealous of the other woman.  How is he to resolve this impossible dilemma?