The Mom and the Whore won the Special Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, despite the reception of festival-goers divided between enthusiasm and indignation. Reception which was renewed during its distribution in room. With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont and Françoise Lebrun, the film was also awarded the palm of scandal. It comes out in theaters on Wednesday June 8, 2022, a discovery for many, an inexhaustible rediscovery for others.
In Paris, Alexandre shines with his idleness and lives on Marie’s hook while multiplying the conquests that she supports somehow. Dumped by Gilberte, his other mistress, the bohemian seduces Véronika, an intern at the Laënnec hospital, who advocates sexual freedom by offering herself to whoever wants it. Alexandre falls in love with her and introduces her to Marie who will gradually accept her into her failing household.
A late offspring of the New Wave, with its square format, its sumptuous black and white lit by Pierre Lhomme, its natural settings, a live sound, and the Jean-Pierre Léaud icon revealed by François Truffaut, The Mom and the Whore immediately became a cult film. Jean Eustache then captured the spirit of the times, a changing society, a nascent feminism, four years after the events of 1968. The film exposed what was to become, nearly fifty years later, a contemporary “societal” issue, a terminology that did not exist at the time, proof of its relevance, almost premonitory.
The character of Alexandre lets himself be rocked by a nonchalance populated by friends as idle as himself who, on the pretext of their individualism, defend a vision of the backward woman, from the 19th century. A conservatism to which Marie and especially Véronika respond with an open-mindedness characteristic of the 70s and which was to regress from the 80s until today.
The 1973 scandal was mainly aimed at the very raw dialogues of the film, unusual at the time, where sex is approached without embellishment. The nudity then stammering on the screen, and the constitution of a threesome devoid of any morality and contrary to the institution of marriage did the rest. The Mom and the Whore can then be seen as the manifesto of a revolution in mentalities, at the heart of which sexuality and the relationship between men and women are called into question by the new generation. A problem that finds a very current echo today, with #MeToo and the LGBT movement reconnecting with the feminist and reformist demands of the 1970s. Modernity is embodied in perennial works ahead of their time, and The Mom and the Whore is one of the most obvious spearheads. Essential.
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Gender : Drama
Director: Jean Eustache
Actors: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Francoise Lebrun, Bernadette Lafont
Country : France
Duration : 3h40
Exit : June 8, 2022
Distributer : Wild Bunch