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The Mother and the Whore

La Maman et la Putain

1973

Jean Eustache

Jean-Pierre Léaud, Françoise Lebrun, Bernadette Lafont, Pierre Cottrell ...

7.9

2,911

Drama. Romance It 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. The film explores the confused and ambivalent interrelations of these three lost souls.

	Media	Author	Review
		Nora Sayre The New York Times	"Watching 'The Mother and the Whore', you find that you're back in the movie-sludge of the nineteen-fifties (...) You start wondering if nothing has been learned about movies, about acting, about men and women."
		Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"It still works a quarter-century later because it was so focused on its subjects, and lacking in pretension. It is rigorously observant (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"
		Richard Brody The New Yorker	"[Eustache] brought a sense of social and family history to his work (...) Jean Eustache’s entire oeuvre is in crucial need of release"
		Nathan Rabin AV Club	"As in the best films of John Cassavetes, 'The Mother And The Whore' transcends the medium of film altogether and appears to capture life as it is lived, in all its messy, painful, infinite sadness"
		Time Out	"'The Mother and the Whore' is an icy comment on the New Wave, informed throughout by Eustache's striking visual intelligence."
		Don Druker Chicago Reader	"A major work (...) because of writer-editor-director Jean Eustache's breathtaking honesty and accuracy in portraying the sexual and intellectual mores of its era"
		Kevin Thomas Los Angeles Times	"[It] stands the test of time magnificently (...) An uncluttered directness marked by an exquisite yet understated sense of composition and camera movement"
		Jake Cole Slant	"Eustache ingeniously illustrates how easy it is for people’s despair to induce a surrender to forces too big and complex to grasp (...) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"
		Michael Wilmington Chicago Tribune	"A landmark French film - a classic that remains as burningly alive and shocking today as it was in 1973 (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"
		David Parkinson Radio Times	"Jean Eustache's masterpiece was the last hurrah of the French New Wave (...) A brilliantly observed portrait of a moment and its attitudes that remains as compelling as it is controversial (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"
		William Thomas Empire	"Only towards the end does the running time weigh heavy, but by then you're hooked enough to care what happens (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"

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The Mother and the Whore

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