Jean Eustache-La Maman et la putain (1973)

One of the most important French films of the 1970s, Jean Eustache's marathon drama focuses on three twentysomething Parisians in a bizarre love triangle: Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is a seemingly unemployed narcissist involved with both a live-in girlfriend (Bernadette Lafont) and a Polish nurse (Françoise Lebrun) whom he picked up at a café and with whom he begins a desultory affair. ~ Leo Charney, All Movie Guide




This masterpiece by French director Jean Eustache is a scathing love story set in the aftermath of May 1968. Jean-Pierre Leaud stars as Alexandre, a Parisian slacker whose "open" relationship with live-in girlfriend Marie (Bernadette Lafont) seems ideal, but proves damaging and unrealistic on an emotional level. He begins an affair with Veronika (Francois Lebrun), a sexually promiscuous nurse at a local hospital, and they fall in love, despite their chosen, casual lifestyles. RottenD




The three of them later try to make it as a menage a trois, but mostly they drink lots of whiskey, smoke lots of cigarettes, play lots of records, and say lots and lots of brilliant things over the course of the film's 215 minutes of running time. Isabelle Weingarten co-stars as one of Alexandre's previous loves, and Jacques Renard plays his sardonic friend. Look for Eustache himself behind sunglasses in a funny bit at a supermarket. This fearless, funny, and insightful film has been called one of the key works of 1970s cinema. RottenD




Clocking in at over 3 1/2 hours, the movie focuses less on plot than on the confused and ambivalent interrelations of these three lost souls. As such, it becomes a searing document of the aftermath of Paris's social and sexual revolutions of the Sixties, particularly the uprisings of May 1968.




These characters know that they are supposed to be free and liberated, but they don't quite know how to go about it, or how to make it work in practice, and their efforts don't seem to make them any happier. In the guise of a plotless style seemingly borrowed from cinéma vérité documentaries, Eustache unfolds a critique of both the illusory liberations of his social moment and the dead-end heritage of his cinematic moment. By casting Jean-Pierre Léaud, an icon of the French New Wave who first made his name as the star of François Truffaut's pioneering The 400 Blows (1959), Eustache sets out to rewrite the conventions of a French New Wave that had changed from a revolutionary film movement into a formulaic mainstream style.





Despite its deceptively rambling manner, the film effortlessly intertwines its characters' psychological dilemmas with a portrait of its cultural moment with a revision of a wide swath of film history from Truffaut's Jules and Jim to Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game to Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living. This experimental classic is not for all viewers, but it's an unforgettable, and historically indispensable, experience for those who can stick with it. ~ Leo Charney, All Movie Guide