Regarded by many as the monumental achievement of 1970s’ French cinema, not only by dint of scale (the film runs nearly four hours) but by virtue of its lacerating, confessional portrait of a generation in search of itself, The Mother and the Whore is a film like no other. Consecrated to the word, it consists almost entirely of lengthy monologues and dialogues: a quasi-autobiographical meditation on love, sex, and the malaise of living. The film, not coincidentally, stars two veterans of the French nouvelle vague, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Bernadette Lafont; it is deeply marked by and indebted to that era even as it stands in critical opposition to the cinematic excesses of that period. In his 1982 obituary for Jean Eustache, critic Serge Daney wrote that thanks to The Mother and the Whore, people would remember exactly what it was like in Paris for the generation that came of age in the wake of May 1968.