Eustache reportedly drew the film’s emotional content from his own life, and I think that is one key to its greatness: It has the gut-level passion and authenticity of a first-hand account, one by an artist who perhaps sensed that he needed to pack everything he had to say into one massive opus. Autobiography in French cinema, of course, had been kick-started by François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” which led to an ongoing series of Antoine Doinel films, all starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as Truffaut’s alter ego. But those films were not only essentially comedic, they also emerged from the buoyant early ‘60s, whereas “The Mother and the Whore,” the product of an artist whose turn of mind might be called forensically confessional, was one of many films of its era brooding on the dark, deflating aftermath of May ’68.
That this edgy probe into personal and cultural depths still has an air of grace and lightness owes much to Eustache’s style. As in earlier New Wave classics—think of Godard’s “Masculine Feminine” and “Vivra Sa Vie”—Pierre Lhomme’s luminous black and white cinematography combines documentary-like immediacy and classical polish, qualities perhaps most important to Eustache’s subtly elegant and varied compositions in Marie’s cramped flat.
Then there are the director’s skills with his main actors. Called “the face of the French New Wave,” veteran performer Lafont brings maturity and intelligence to her work as Marie, nicely balancing the character’s pained awareness of Alexandre’s inadequacies as a partner with the sense that aging may underlie her reluctance to let go of him. A relative newcomer to acting, Lebrun’s hurt and wariness are the film’s emotional cornerstone, and her phenomenal work in a penultimate scene announces her genius at sustained monologues. As for Léaud: it’s interesting to compare his work here with that in Eustache’s 1966 short “Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes.” In the earlier film, he’s subtle and restrained: a very good actor even if already famous. In “The Mother and the Whore,” by contrast, it seems to me that he’s playing Léaud-as-icon as much as Alexandre; it’s a tricky super-imposition, but somehow it works. (Near the time of this film, he starred in two other cinema milestones, Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” and Truffaut’s “Day for Night.”)
In France, strictly historical readings say the New Wave lasted for a relatively brief time, 1957-63. But from a global perspective, wavelets from this most important and influential movement in cinema history continued to wash around the world throughout the ‘60s and beyond. While “The Mother and the Whore” is generally called a post-New Wave film, I’ve long thought of it as the movement’s last masterpiece, a grand summation of its extraordinary beauties and achievements, made by an auteur who, on the basis of this one work, today ranks alongside Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer and the other giants who narrowly preceded him.