Film at Lincoln Center and Janus Films announced an incredible retrospective from July 7-13: “The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache” celebrating the career of the iconoclastic French post-New Wave director. “The films I made are as autobiographical as fiction can be,” Eustache described, and, in his tragically short career (he committed suicide a few weeks before his 43rd birthday), his one masterpiece- The Mother and the Whore has been given a 4k restoration and will be shown from June 26-July 6th. This long, messy, indulgent, mesmerizing portrait of a Parisian slacker and pseudo-intellectual (Jean-Pierre Leaud) has influenced a generation of filmmakers. This is a film that absolutely devastated me when I first saw it, and I was nervous when I went to see this new restoration at the NY Film Festival last fall, worried that I might not feel the same years later. But the film retained the same hypnotic power. Perhaps more so.
Jean Eusatche’s 1973 film is about the rootless, disaffected youth of 70s Paris. Starring Francois Truffaut’s cinematic alter-ego Jean-Pierre Leaud as Alexandre, living and sleeping with Marie (Bernadette Lafont), who works in a dress shop. Alexandre doesn’t do much of anything. He’s impulsive, opinionated, full-of-himself, strutting down the street nattily dressed with his knotted, long silk scarf. He spends his days in cafes, chain-smoking and talking with friends when he isn’t picking up girls. He asks his sculptor friend, “What are you doing tomorrow?” and the friend replies, “Nothing, of course.”
His new conquest is Veronika (Francoise Lebrun), an anesthesiologist at a hospital who is more sexually liberated, free-wheeling and mercurial than flings he is accustomed to. Veronika shows up drunk at 4 in the morning and climbs into bed with Alexandre and Marie. “Your romances are starting to piss me off,” Marie admits. Typically, when Marie confesses to seeing another man, Alexandre loses it.
Coming in at a punishing 3 hours and 27 minutes, there’s endless smoking, drinking, talking, fucking and listening to records. In one astonishing sequence, Marie listens to the entire Edith Piaf song- Les Amants de Paris. But it all has a cumulative, hypnotic power to it. At the end when Veronika unleashes a Joycean stream-of-consciousness rant about sex, it is cinema at its most personal, provocative and thrilling.
