Viewed by many as the most monumental achievement of post-New Wave French filmmaking, not only because of its more than three-and-a-half hour length 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 remains a touchstone of contemporary cinema. An anti-epic on the war between the sexes in 1970s Paris, the film is made up almost entirely of monologues and conversations among the inhabitants of an unstable ménage à trois. This massive slice of life derives much of its power from Lhomme’s understated, fly-on-the-wall cinematography, which grounds even the most self-indulgent or self-destructive behavior by the film’s characters in an undeniably recognizable reality.