(Cannes) A legendary New Wave masterpiece, but a phantom film: broadcast very confidentially for half a century, The mother and the whore by Jean Eustache, a unique testimony to post-May 68 male-female relations, made its big comeback on Tuesday at Cannes.
Updated yesterday at 12:54 p.m.
Even before the official opening of the Festival, the screening of the newly restored version of the film released in 1973, in black and white, is the event of the Cannes Classics section, before being released in theaters on June 8.
Iconic actor of the New Wave, Jean-Pierre Léaud, the “Antoine Doinel” of Truffaut, who will celebrate his 78th birthday at the end of the month and interprets the young Alexandre, an anguished dandy at the center of a love triangle, was present in the room. Françoise Lebrun, 77, who plays one of Alexandre’s young lovers, Veronika, as well.
The director, Jean Eustache, committed suicide in 1981, and the third performer, Bernadette Lafont, who plays Marie, died in 2013.
Five decades after the release of the film, an emotional sequence in the room which received a standing ovation from Jean-Pierre Léaud and Françoise Lebrun, at the end of the 3:40 screening.
Fifty years later, what remains of the scent of scandal of this film, whose ban on those under 18 will not be lifted until six months after the death of its director?
In 1973, The mother and the whore, his legendary tirades and his love triangle, devising unvarnishedly on free love or abortion, had deeply divided. The film left Cannes with a “Special Grand Jury Prize”, despite the opposition of its president Ingrid Bergman, who finds the work “despicable”.
It entered into the legend of the Croisette, with its spectators screaming either at the immoral scandal, or at the masterpiece of mad freedom, and a memorable jostling between whistles and applause at the exit. But the film has hardly been seen since.
Boris Eustache, Jean’s son, who controls the rights, ensured that all of his father’s work was restored, and not only The mother.
“Art of dialogue”
It’s done thanks to Les Films du Losange, a company founded in the 1960s by Barbet Schroeder to produce Éric Rohmer, and which has in its catalog legends of the New Wave, from Rivette to Godard. All of Eustache’s work will be restored by next year with the help of the CNC.
For Régine Vial, director of the Losange films, it became urgent to act: “the photochemical is damaged over time, and the work, never digitized, threatened to disappear”, she explains to AFP.
Filmed on the spot and with the economy, in seven weeks and by requiring from the actors an almost unhealthy respect for the text, The mother and the whore belongs to the “cinematographic pantheon”, but its aura extends well beyond French borders, she underlines.
He inspired generations of directors, including Jim Jarmusch, who dedicated his Broken Flowers to Jean Eustache. In France too, the film left its mark on Arnaud Desplechin, “very marked by the art of dialogue” and who recognizes an influence from one of his first films, How I quarreled…(my sex life) (1996).
“It’s a seminal film, which invented a part of cinema”, explains to AFP the director, in competition at Cannes for Brother and sister. “The fact that he is visible again is great news for the younger generations, who only know him from legend.”
As for Michel Hazanavicius, who officially opens the festival on Tuesday evening with Cut! he explains to AFP that he “sought to see her, but never succeeded”.
” It’s shame ! smiles the Oscar-winning director of The Artist : “it’s a legendary film, being able to see it again in the cinema, it’s going to be great”.