Viewed by many as the most monumental achievement of the French cinema of the 1970s, not only by dint of scale (the film runs 3 hours and 40 minutes) but by virtue of its lacerating, confessional portrait of a generation —people who in director Jean Eustache’s words "were desperate because life was passing them by...[and who] could find no explanation for their predicament"—The Mother and the Whore is a film like no other. A work consecrated to the word, consisting almost entirely of lengthy monologues and dialogues, the film is Eustache’s autobiographical meditation on love, sex, and the malaise of living. Not coincidentally, the film stars two veterans of the French nouvelle vague, Jean-Pierre Leaud and Bernadette Lafont, and is itself a work deeply marked by and indebted to that era while at the same time a work which stands in critical opposition to the cinematic excesses of that period. Winner of the Critic’s Prize and Special Jury Award at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival.