For the 50th anniversary of the film The mother and the whore by Jean Eustache, the Cinéma du Musée has scheduled several performances of this unclassifiable film, my favorite of French cinema, as part of a retrospective of the filmmaker’s works which begins this Friday.
If we were to sell The mother and the whore internationally, I would opt for this formula: The Ultimate French Movie “. A three and a half hour film in black and white, talkative, with a boring title, a dive into a love triangle formed by Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont and Françoise Lebrun, in full depression after May 68.
The first time I saw The mother and the whoreafter 20 minutes, I told my boyfriend “It’s not true that I’m going to endure this for three hours, there are always limits. But there’s something magical about this film, something I’ve rarely experienced in the cinema: you literally end up falling into hypnosis and you can’t let go. In any case, the lover and I, we fuck each other The mother and the whore once a year for 20 years. We even bought the script to read it and recite the lines by heart.
In 1972, Jean Eustache wrote this about his film: “This closed universe became stronger as the film lasted. Each second, the spectator takes off a little more from his life to enter definitively into the tragic world of the characters. It is no longer a question of making the characters believe in the reality or not. Duration means that they are there, irrefutably. »
I think then of my late colleague Marc-André Lussier who has just left us. For the world of cinema, he had been there, indisputably, for decades. He had seen it all. During his holidays, he caught up with the rare films of the year that he had missed, and he scoured the stores to fill his video library which could have made film libraries blush.
The mother and the whore by Jean Eustache has long been an impossible to find film. If I have been able to watch it once a year for 20 years, it is primarily thanks to Luc Perreault, the film critic who preceded Marc-André Lussier. Luc had given us the video cassettes of the film which was so long that the distributor had cut it into two cassettes, so that for a long time I had the impression that The mother and the whore was a two-part film. As the Dunes by Denis Villeneuve, who paid a touching tribute to my colleague in a radio interview. It’s very rare that filmmakers, and artists in general, salute the work of a critic, a profession that is being lost with the crisis in the media, which has often itself fueled the confusion of genres, a time when we prefer that stars make reviews, rather than leaving the task to specialists (even maniacs) like Marc-André Lussier.
However, devoted critics of the caliber of Marc-André Lussier are at the base of the cinematographic culture of many filmmakers and, above all, film lovers, essential to the 7e art.
In his very recent book of memories, the rejoicing Cinema Speculationdirector Quentin Tarantino devotes an entire chapter to his admiration for critic Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote with passion and respect about B-movies and exploitation that “serious” critics refused to stuff, what Tarantino calls “Team Two” critics. “It is thus, explains Tarantino, in articles of Kevin Thomas, that I heard for the first time of Russ Meyer, Jess Franco and Dario Argento. In most daily newspapers, the columns of the exploitation films were not written by the titular critic of “team one”, nor even by his replacement of “team two”, but were handed over to a deputy. fife, the kind of mission that often came down to punishment. And the articles they wrote about those movies deliberately attacked the movie itself (they weren’t just angry that they had to write the article, they were angry that they had to watch the movie ). »
Tarantino is right, it was like that in the golden age of the written media, when we covered absolutely all the films even in the most obscure cinemas, of which there were many. Marc-André Lussier had his preferences, but he was on team one, two, and even three, in his spare time.
Quentin Tarantino’s next film, which he announces as his last, his tenth and final achievement, is called The Movie Critic. I wouldn’t miss it for anything in the world, thinking of Marc-André.
Covering an art in a newspaper for so long is an art in itself. The people who read you love you or hate you, but meanwhile, whether they agree or not, they are reading, questioning and debating about this art. For Marc-André, it was the 7e. He didn’t want to do anything but movies, and because he refused to be a cultural “roamer” called upon to decide on everything, it took him a long time to get a job, and that’s probably why he was working three times harder for his niche than anyone else. It’s this hard work that maintained the presence of cinema from here and elsewhere in our newspaper, and that, in the greatest professionalism – I know, I was once his boss who received his texts without typos. His last Cannes cover in the spring had been flawless. I felt happy to find his festival in its usual form after three years of pandemic. Cannes, Berlin, Venice were for him the equivalent of the Olympic Games for the Sports colleagues. He defended a certain idea of cinema and its experience, at the time of streaming and movies you watch on an iPhone.
The video cassette tapes of The mother and the whore given by Luc Perreault at the end of the 1990s ended up wearing out, my boyfriend and I were desperate to no longer be able to do our annual cinematic ritual. I asked Marc-André Lussier if he had this film in his video library and, of course, he had it. He kindly made us a DVD copy which we still have today, although The mother and the whore is rendered on YouTube and possibly on illegal download sites (if pirates still have any taste). I realize that I have never seen it in the cinema. I will go see it in theaters, to pay tribute to my colleague.