The Mother and the Whore
The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache
June 23 - July 13, 2023
At long last presented in a striking new restoration worthy of the film’s reputation, Jean Eustache’s hard-to-see masterpiece uses an obsessive, talkative ménage à trois as the jumping-off point for an intense exploration of sexual politics among liberated yet alienated moderns.
Through Thursday!
After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May 1968 came The Mother and the Whore, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Eustache that captured a disillusioned generation navigating the post-idealism 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless, Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a dalliance with the younger, sexually liberated Veronika (Françoise Lebrun, Eustache’s own former lover), leading to a volatile open relationship marked by everyday emotional violence and subtle but catastrophic shifts in power dynamics. Transmitting his own sex life to the screen with startling immediacy, Eustache achieves an intimacy so deep it cuts.
The Mother and the Whore has been restored and remastered in 4K in 2022 by Les Films du Losange with the support of CNC and the participation of Cinémathèque Suisse and of Chanel. Image restoration by L’Immagine Ritrovata/Éclair Classics, supervised by Jacques Besse and Boris Eustache. Sound restoration by Léon Rousseau-L.E. Diapason.
For $30, receive one ticket to a film in The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache and a select menu item at Café Paradiso, located in FLC’s Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. Learn more about our dinner and a movie combo here.
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