THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE
(LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN)
Tuesday, October 11 – Truffaut Theatre –8:15 pm
Presented by Producer Charles Gillibert
FICTION / DRAMA
CLASSIC SERIES
Presented in Association with:
Les Films du Losange
Janus Films
Unifrance
West Coast Premiere |Digitally Restored Version | France | 1973 & 2022 | Drama | 220 min | In French with English subtitles
Directed by: Jean Eustache
Written by: Jean Eustache
Produced by: Pierre Cottrell (Les Films du Losange), Bob Rafelson, Alain Coiffier, Vincent Malle (VM Productions), Charles Gillibert (new digital restoration)
Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme
Film Editing: Jean Eustache, Denise de Casabianca
Cast: Bernadette Lafont (Marie), Jean-Pierre Léaud (Alexandre), Françoise Lebrun (Veronika), Isabelle Weingarten (Gilberte)
International Sales: Les Films du Losange
U.S. Distributor: Janus Films
U.S. Release date: to be determined
New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud finds himself at the center of the film’s titular Freudian sexual dilemma, as well as a powerful discourse on the gender politics of the sexual revolution, in Jean Eustache‘s autobiographical tale of an idle, verbose young man and his two lovers — the woman he lives with (Bernadette Lafont), and the one he cheats on her with (Françoise Lebrun). That simple story, told in minute detail, of a love triangle and the repercussions it unleashes caused a scandal when it won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. Yet the film, a veritable time capsule of post-’68 sexual mores & philosophies, has been deemed a masterpiece by critics the world over. It was named the Best Film of the 1970s by Cahier du Cinéma, and was recently ranked number two of the greatest French films of all time by Time Out magazine. For years, it has been next to impossible to see this film at all, let alone on a decent print. So we are thrilled to screen this gorgeous, newly restored and remastered 4K projection of The Mother and the Whore to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its original release. The film is presented in conjunction with Janus Films, after kicking off this year’s Cannes Classics section in May.
Writer/director Jean Eustache only made a handful of films in his all-too-brief career. As brilliant as he was compulsive, Eustache was clearly obsessed with variations on a theme. He directed a remake of his 1968 documentary La Rosière de Pessac in 1979, and A Dirty Story (1977) features two versions of the same tale, told in the very same words — one a documentary, the other a narrative film. Eustache was apparently as loquacious as his characters, and many of Léaud’s endless monologues in The Mother and the Whore were reportedly lifted verbatim from his own real-life monologues, which he subsequently transcribed. A post-New Wave filmmaker close to the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, he began making shorts and medium-length films in the sixties, including Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (1966) and the documentary Le Cochon (1970). He made just two feature films in his lifetime: The Mother and the Whore (1973), which won the Grand Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Prize in Cannes and the Interfilm Award in Berlin; and Mes petites amoureuses (1974). A subsequent short, Les photos d’Alix (1980), garnered a César Award for Best Short Film and the Grand Prize for shorts at the Montréal World Film Festival. Eustache took his own life, at the age of 42, in 1981.
