Jean Eustache is a member of Cahiers du cinéma coterie and a less-heralded figure in the Post-Nouvelle Vague French cinema, only because he left just 2 narrative full-features (together with sundry medium-length to short-length documentaries and fiction works) during his transient life on earth, sadly he committed suicide in 1981, aged only 42.Shot in grainy monochrome, in minimal settings with a 219-minute length, THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE is a long-winded treatise about a ménage à trois between a man and two women, conspicuously counterpoints and eventually complements Truffaut’s seminal JULES & JIM (1962).Alexandre (Léaud) is an intellectual flaneur, a carryover of May 68 unrest (and an incorrigible cinephile) who apparently has no job and no intention to have one, shacking up with his current girlfriend Marie (Lafont) in the latter’s poky Parisian apartment, sleeping on a bedstead-less mattress on the floor, coaxing the gramophone and the telephone. After bungling his prompt marriage proposal to a former girlfriend Gilberte (Waingarten), who later, decides to marry her current boyfriend instead, Alexandre happens on Veronika (Lebrun), a nurse of Polish lineage. They begin to date, which Alexandre fails to hide from Marie, whose checked exasperation further pushes him toward a seemingly docile Veronika.Patronizing popular premises like Les Deux Magots Café and Café de Flore, the pair relishes their commonalities in smoking, liqueur-consuming and mutual attractions. Often Alexandre mansplains about his blue-sky ideas and philosophies, and tries overtly to impress her with his intellect, and does it work?Veronika gives little away about her interiority while nearly impassively watches him talk a blue streak with enough courtesy and a semblance of interest. She knows how to play the game, and only later, she lets on that she is a woman of easy virtue and it both excites Alexandre and erects a red flag for him.Things get more intriguing when the trio gathers together, their first meeting ends up as a disaster, which Eustache advisedly doesn’t show on the screen, it appears there is no love lost between Veronika and Marie. During Marie’s business trip to London (she works in a boutique clothes shop), Alexandre invites Veronika over for some intimate action, and reciprocally, she also brings him to the hospital apartment where she lives (it is forbidden to bring guest and the room has no en-suite facilities) and leaves him a key to her room the morning after.In their airily coordinated pas de deux, eventually, it is Veronika who proactively catalyze their mired status quo. After being snubbed by Alexandre, who is somehow spooked by her initiative of going steady, she drunkenly blows in Marie’s apartment on one early morning, jumps onto the mattress and cozies up to both Marie and Alexandre, and henceforth, she becomes a regular visitor and witnesses firsthand of Alexandre and Marie’s usual tiffs (the vexing double standard that he is miffed that Marie still keeps contact with one of her exes).However, their triangle is far from stable, fed up after much brouhaha, including a suicidal attempt, Veronika breaks down, lets rip about Alexandre and Marie’ traumatic bonding, whore-shaming and Sexual Liberation. Lebrun, an ex-girlfriend of Eustache, nails the lengthy monologue with flying colors, her self-effacing persona, modest look and stooped comportment are so beguilingly calibrated that when Veronika’s anger and frustration well up and erupt, it is a tsunami that render both Alexandre and audience speechless, as if Eustache tries to admonish us that never take a woman on the face value, each has a volcano within (especially those seemingly quiet ones), her profound, often perspicacious interiority is much more than what a chauvinist can bargain on.Juggling between “maternal” and “promiscuous”, Alexandre can be easily read as a laughing stock, a man-child whose arrested development can only be stemmed by entering marriage, accepting monopoly like myriads of others. But Léaud, in his most stirring performance Yours Truly has ever watched thus far (maybe partly due to Eustache’s counter-improvisation dictates), justifies Alexandre’s inward-looking mentality with total candor sans self-consciousness, he doesn’t ask for our sympathy, he has neither flair nor pizzazz like Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine in JULES & JIM. Alexandre is who he is, warts and all.Compared with Alexandre and Veronika, Marie isn’t allotted ample screen-time (or formidable monologues) to be bracketed as their co-lead, yet Lafont still cuts through the screen like a meteor for her irrepressible vim and vigor. Unlike Veronika, on paper Marie ought to be an open book, intelligible and assertive, but Lafont’s cold stare adds an essential veneer of mystique that shrieks for audience’s attention and begs for eventually unfulfilled inspection of her character, Marie’s seething discontent is as palpable as Alexandre’s rodomontade and Veronika’s unapologetic dissolution.Eustache’s politique des auteurs is carved in his wide-ranging choices of the diegetic music played by Alexandre, from Mozart, Offenbach to Deep Purple and édith Piaf, his onion-peeling perseverance to burrow into the place where it really hurts out of a mundane, carefree relationship and his mores-scorning persuasion that liberates his characters from the overarching moral conformity, THE MOTHER AND WHORE is a self-absorbing paragon of cinematic monism where there is no duality of right or wrong, everyone subsists in and is incapable of breaking free from their own petty prison.referential entries: Jacques Rivette’s THE GANG OF FOUR (1989, 8.0/10); Jean-Luc Godard’s A MARRIED WOMAN (1964, 8.1/10); Fran?ois Truffaut’s STOLEN KISSES (1968, 7.8/10), JULES & JIM (1962, 8.6/10).

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