Alexandre lives in his girlfriend Marie’s apartment. He also wants to return to his ex-lover Gilberte and dates the sexually liberated Veronika. Jean Eustache’s most famous film plunges into the Parisian everyday of the 1970s which is a mix of politics, sex, desperate conversations about love, and disenchantments with the 1968 revolution. The film will be screened from a 35 mm print. It will be introduced by Garage Screen curator Evgeny Gusyatinskiy.
Jobless intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) maneuvers skillfully between three girlfriends. In parallel to living with his lover Marie (Bernadette Lafont) in her tiny flat, he is trying to resurrect a relationship with his ex Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), who is going to marry another man. Residing in Saint-Germain-de-Prés—the intellectual epicenter of Paris’s left bank, Alexandre also meets the nurse Veronika (Françoise Lebrun) who easily and playfully changes sexual partners.
A seminal film of the French 1970s, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore captures the existential hangover that engulfed the French left following the May revolution of 1968, lost and already alienated from its enactors. The project of a new world quickly became a banality, as did sexual freedom which turned into a routine.
Lasting three and a half hours, The Mother and the Whore only covers a few days from Alexandre’s life. Eustache almost synchronizes the action time and the time of the movie itself, leading to a feeling that the life of the disappointed rebel and dreamer Alexandre is limited to momentary presence alone, which he desperately fills with mundane activities: gatherings in cafes, visits to a friend-artist, plentiful conversations about love and politics, sex and adultery. This allows Eustache to materialize time reduced only to the present and thus, again, devoid of the future for which the May 1968 revolutionaries fought.
The screening will be preceded by the presentation of the new Garage Screen section Happy Hours. It features auteur films that are longer than usual and work with the visualization of time. These are innovative movies that expand cinematic possibilities by extending screen time. Happy Hours offers an incomparably deeper experience of cinematic and physical time, which is only possible on the big screen and symbolically makes it even bigger.
The film will be screened in French with Russian subtitles.
The Mother and the Whore
Dir. Jean Eustache
France, 1973. 217 min. 18+
Technical partner of the screening: Kinoperedvizhka.