Films teach you about life…and making beds.

Jean Eustache’s masterpiece The Mother and the Whore (1973) is an important film in cinema history. Sure it is self-indulgent to make a three and a half hour film based around prolonged conversations but to keep an audience captivated for its duration is talent. However it is an artifact of its times.

Somehow I felt I’d seen this film before in one guise or another. I think the style (lingering shots, Marxist sermonizing) exists in a plethora of films from Bertolucci’s Partner, Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and a variety of American Indie cinema (such as the work of John Cassavette’s and even a film I recently fell in love with, In Search of a Midnight Kiss). It is amazing to watch a film that really does it well.

Generally speaking, they don’t films like they used to. This is a film completely carried by the quality of its script, performances and cinematograph, rather than special effects or fast editing. And it has a lot to say.

I have taken a recent interest in what I’ve termed ‘slice of life’ films, where seemingly not much happens (we follow characters through a brief period of their lives and often leave them where they began) but their profoundness lays in their subtlety. Perhaps The Mother and the Whore is the ultimate slice of life film. We enter in media res, initially grappling to fit the characters and their lives together. Then we are taken on a journey through their everyday lives, growing to know them intimately. And just as abruptly as we entered we are cut off again, never to discover how it all ends. But does life or love ever have a true end point?

Then again the film is deliberately alienating, never allowing complete identification with the characters it so vividly creates. From Alexandre’s first speech you’re thinking, people in real life don’t speak like that. He sounds like he’s talking from a script. But that’s the point. His whole character is a performance. It is a role he has determined to play and he is engulfed by his persona.

Alexandre is a relic from 1968 – a wayward, self-obsessed bohemian who spends his days sleeping or hanging out in cafes philosophising (like one great line when he comments to his friend about reading in cafes: “I am going to do this every day…like a job”). He is in the midst of an existential crisis, speaks in lofty discourse and is completely hypocritical. It’s a fascinating portrayal as you can’t help but be sucked into his view of the world.

Commentators have emphasised the way the film captures the malaise of post-68. There the pervading sense, we’ve had this amazing social revolution…what now? The next generation feels like nothing can live up to the events of 68 and doubt whether it actually changed anything.

Significantly Jean-Pierre Leaud is cast in the lead. As Truffaut’s alter ego (beginning from The 400 Blows and later to play alongside Truffaut in the famous film about making a film Night For Day) he is a recognisable actor from French cinema and iconic of the New Wave. Having watched Leaud grow up in Truffaut’s films, he is a part of the system and all there is left for Alexandre/Leaud to do is reference other films, books and music. Alexandre sums it up when he states “phoniness is the hereafter”.

The film is more about the conversations and the character types presented than about their relationships. Afterall you can never actually believe Alexandre truly feels anything. I’m sure you need to watch it more than once to truly appreciate the diatribes spouting from these character’s mouths which at times border on poetic. It also a beautiful evocation of Parisian life – its streets, cafes and bars.

But for me what it is actually about is destructive patterns we have and cannot break. The film is full of repeated shots and scenarios: Alexandre waking up to the phone; inhabiting the same cafes; following the same patterns of following in love and destroying that love; the rows and passionate making up Marie; Veronika’s drinking and her continual return after apparent rejection. At the end you can’t imagine anything changing and significantly it in this mysterious phenomenon of love that our most destructive patterns exist.