The Mother and the Whore
With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont, Françoise Lebrun.
France, 1973, 35mm, black & white, 219 min.
French with English subtitles.
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 stars two veterans of the French nouvelle vague, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Bernadette Lafont, and is deeply marked by that movement even as it stands in critical opposition to its cinematic excesses. In his 1982 obituary for Jean Eustache, critic Serge Daney opined that thanks to The Mother and the Whore, people would know exactly what it was like to be of the generation that came of age in the wake of May 1968.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
Children of Paradise
Fanny and Alexander
Milestones
Serge Daney: Journey of a Ciné-Son
Fanny and Alexander
Hiroshima mon amour
Children of Paradise
