Black diamond of French cinema, the film makes a return to the big screen in restored version, almost fifty years after its release.
by
“The more we seem false, the far we go. The false, it is the beyond.” These words are those for Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), Dandy Oisif, old century and Baudelairian, palabrant At the cafe facing the young woman, Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), with whom he has just started a link. We are roughly mid-minded by the mother and the whore, a 220-minute film-river, and its author Jean Eustache seems, in this place, to have bet to the main reproach that we will not fail to address to his Film, among the Cris d’Orfraie that welcomed him in May 1973 during his presentation at the Cannes Film Festival. Namely that it sounded false, that we did not speak there as in “real life”, but with this slight dissonance in the incarnation which transpired the rejection of professionalism.
It was to forget, as had thus recalled by the voice of his hero, that the “real” in the cinema is never only one convention among others, and often more manufactured than the others. By its dissonance, the Eustachian actor opens a breach where his whole being rushes, and even more.
The mother and the whore, this black diamond of French cinema, which alone transformed the cumulative tests of the new wave, makes a return to the big screen in restored version, after thirty years of invisibility (a few rare exceptions close). A cut scene was even reintegrated in the assembly for the occasion – to tell the truth a fairly anecdotal passage where the characters go to the cinema see the idols (1968), by Marc’o. Thus accesses the status of official masterpieces a film which has long nourished the Dissensus for its extraordinary proportions, its free inspiration, its resolutely antimodian mind and its way of filming in the bone.
Naked and sophisticated language
The mother and the whore remained this great torrential film, extiring the fact of love from his romantic gangue, to re -situate him in a magnetic field of speeches, attitudes, circulation and reversals. His characters, children of May 68 haunting Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the places of a bygone existentialism (and conspired), think of enjoying the fruits of sexual liberation, while drinking against the archaic patterns which do not have for as much ceased to governing the relations between the sexes.
Alexandre, beautiful penniless speaker, fluttering the whole holy day at the cafes tables, between the flora and the two magots, shares the bed of Marie (Bernadette Lafont), who maintains him bourgeoisment, holding a shop of clothing . One morning, he disappears and finds Gilberte (Proustian reminiscence interpreted by Isabelle Weingarten), a former girlfriend who sends him definitively for a walk.
You have 44.12% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.