THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE
Directed and Written by JEAN EUSTACHE
Three people seduce, wound and demolish one another, all in the name of love. Their poor posturings and deceits, their volatile cartridges of passion, inflict unhealing wounds. The Mother and the Whore is a harrowing psychodrama of destruction.
The geometry of the relationship is a familiar triangle. A young man, Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is involved with two women: a nurse named Veronika (Francoise Lebrun), who titillates him with stories of her rampant promiscuity, and an older woman, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), with whom Alexandre shares an apartment. Alexandre has a kind of glib charm. He is garrulous, eccentric, at ease with his chronic unemployment, and exhilarated by the way in which he can play off his women against each other. For themselves, the women accept his rules and compete for Alexandre with a sort of sidelong intensity that ends one dismal night in a disputed ménage à trois and an attempted suicide.
The title of this quite remarkable French film assumes inflections of meaning as the weights and balances of the relationships shift. It appears at first to refer separately to each of Alexandre's women. The whore would be the desperately promiscuous nurse. The mother appears to be the severe Marie, whose bursts of passion and stern, sometimes hysterical anger draw Alexandre to her. It becomes clear after a time, though, that both Veronika and Marie share the same qualities. They are, in fact, reciprocals of each other, embodiments of the masculine ideal of the female, mother and whore at once.
By the time the movie ends, the title has assumed a deadly irony. Alexandre becomes the victim of his own limited ideas of sexual identity. He is seduced by Veronika's pathology. In his desperation, he sees marriage as the only means to stop the terrible pain and destruction that have flowed between them. Hysterical with hurt and fatigue, Veronika accepts his proposal, and the numbness of an impermanent stalemate descends on both of them.
The Mother and the Whore has the energy and quick, almost surreptitious illumination of the best improvised work. The low-contrast black and white photography gives the film a cool, as tringent look that cuts nicely against the gathering force of the script. Jean Eustache, who is 35 and whose previous work (Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes) has been shown in the U.S. only at a few museums, planned every move and wrote every word of the 3½-hour assault. The length, which hurts only occasionally, is a part not only of the design of the film but its final impact. The real triumph in this emotional marathon lies in the shady areas of tone and balance. Disassembling and reassembling his blighted lovers in various moods and stances, Eustache achieves a fine perspective — detached but never dispassionate.
Jay Cocks