The Mother and the WhoreDirected by Jean Eustache
Produced by Elite Films
Genres : Fiction - Runtime : 3 h 40 min
French release : 17/05/1973
Production year : 1972
DirectorActorsSynopsis In Paris, the pedantic Alexandre lives with his mate Marie in her apartment, an open relationship. Alexandre, who is idle and chauvinist, spends his days reading, drinking and shagging women. After flirting with his former affair, Gilberte, who tells him that she will marry soon her boyfriend, Alexandre meets the Laenne Hospital nurse Veronika Osterwald and they schedule a date. Alexandre learns that Veronika is a promiscuous woman that loves to shag and introduces her to Marie. They have a threesome and Alexandre has a crush on Veronika. Source : IMDb About Production In 1972 Eustache had begun to doubt his career in films and contemplated quitting the business. He told a reporter from Le Nouvel Observateur "If I knew what it was that I wanted, I wouldn't wake up in the morning to make films. I'd do nothing, I'd try to live without doing or producing anything." Soon afterwards he got a new idea for a film to make with his friends Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont and Françoise Lebrun, who at that time was a literature student that he knew and had never acted before. He was loaned money from friend Barbet Schroeder to spend three months writing the script, which was over three-hundred pages. Although the film often seems to be highly improvised, every word of dialogue was written by Eustache. The film was shot in only four months on a budget of 700,000 francs. Eustache called it a very hostile film, and it mostly consisted of dialogues and monologues about sex. Eushache says that the character Alexandre is "destroying [the three lead characters], but he is looking for it all along. After his voyage into madness and depression, he ends up alone. That's when I stop the film." The film had no musical score and only used natural sounds and occasionally music played by the characters on phonographs, such as Mozart and Edith Piaf. Eustache described the film as a "narrative of certain seemingly innocous acts. It could be the narrative of entirely different acts, in other places. What happens, the places where the action unfolds, have no importance...My subject is the way in which important actions situate themselves in a continum of innocuous ones. It's the description of the normal course of events without the schematic abbreviation of cinematographic dramatization." Reception The Mother and the Whore is considered Eustache's masterpiece, and was called the best film of the 1970s by Cahiers du cinéma. It won the Grand Prix of the Jury and the FIPRESCI prize at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival. The film created a scandal at the Cannes Film Festival, as many critics saw the film as immoral and obscene or, in the words of the broadsheet Le Figaro, "an insult to the nation", while Télé-7-Jours called it a "monument of boredom and a Himalaya of pretension." After gaining little public recognition despite receiving praise throughout the years from critics and directors, such as Andre Bazin, Francois Truffaut and other members of the French New Wave, Eustache became an overnight success and internationally famous after the film's Cannes premiere. He soon financed his next film. The critic Dan Yakir said that the film was "a rare instance in French cinema where the battle of the sexes is portrayed not from the male point of view alone." James Monaco called it, "one of the most significant French films of the 1970s." Jean-Louise Berthomé said, "I am not sure that La mama et la putain, with its romances of a poor young man of 1972, doesn't say something new." Pauline Kael praised the film, saying it reminded her of John Cassavetes in its ability "to put raw truth on the screen - including the boring and the trivial." The film's reputation increased over time. In 1982 the literary magazine, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, celebrated the tenth anniversary of the film by publishing a series of articles on it. Source : Wikipedia Videos Production photos (13)
Posters gallery (2)Production and distributionAssociate production company : Elite Films
Co-production : Les Films du Losange, Ciné Qua Non, Simar Films, VM Productions, Renn Productions
Film export/Foreign Sales : Mercure Distribution
French distribution : Planfilm
Full creditsAssistant Directors : Luc Béraud, Remy Duchemin
Producers : Pierre Cottrell, Barbet Schroeder, Christian Fechner, Claude Berri, Vincent Malle, Marcel Berbert, Jean Yanne
Screenwriter : Jean Eustache
Co-producer : Vincent Malle
Director of Photography : Pierre Lhomme
Sound Recordists : Paul Lainé, Jean-Pierre Ruh
Assistant Operators : Michel Cénet, Jacques Renard
Production Manager : Claude Bertrand
Editors : Jean Eustache, Denise de Casabianca
Continuity supervisor : Irène Lhomme
Sound Mixer : Nara Kollery
Additional Music : Jacques Offenbach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Still Photographer : Bernard Prim
Technical detailsFeature film
Genres : Fiction
Sub-genre : Psychological drama
Themes : Love, Sexuality
Production language : French
Nationality : 100% French (France)
Production year : 1972
French release : 17/05/1973
Runtime : 3 h 40 min
Current status : Released
Visa number : 40264
Visa issue date : 09/05/1973
Approval : Unknown
Production formats :
35mm
Color type : Black & White
Aspect ratio : 1.37
Sound format : Mono
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