La maman et la putain

Three cigarettes in an ashtray

Jean Eustache's La maman et la putain, from and very much of 1973, is a four hour examination of the formation and breakdown of a menage a trois between French twenty somethings. It has the chief attribute and detriment of French arthouse cinema: digressively endless scenes of dialogue in bedsit flats and cafes. This is enough to keep all but the most ardent cinephiles away, but, despite or because of its longueurs, La maman et la putain strikes me as one of the more compelling artifacts of the late New Wave.

As Rivette did in Out 1, Eustache is using the romantic intersections of the bourgeoisie to portray a post-revolutionary generation negotiating the sexual minefield of post-monogamous France. Eustache avoids improvisation, very unlike Out 1. The story is simple and straightforward. Shiftless Alexandre is living with and leeching off Marie, who owns a fashion boutique. He takes up with Veronika, a nurse. Alexandre shifts back and forth between the two women. Briefly, there is a rapprochement between the trio, but the relationships are too tenuous to survive as such. Ultimately, biology decides the romantic victor.

A Pyrrhic victory because the "prize" and main object of desire in the film is the callow, pretentious and feckless Alexandre. A smoking, lying, two-timer who the ladies cannot resist. Eustache places him in the firmament of Parisian cafe society, but the books he reads, the records he plays and the movies he quotes are merely signifiers of a character that has not coalesced. "I'm just kidding, but seriously," Alexandre spouts. Eustache is able to make Alexandre tolerable for nearly four hours because he cast Jean-Pierre Leaud, the masculine face of his generation in France. Leaud makes the pompous pronouncements of Alexandre with a soupçon of his puppy dog charm. Eustache is artist enough to portray the pathology behind the charming mask of Alexandre in what amounts to a self-portrait and critique.

Francoise Lebrun

A menage a trois must contain at least one folie a deux. Eustache was involved with the actress playing Veronika, the haunting Francoise Lebrun. This adds to the sense of the film as a critical self-portrait, particularly when Veronika correctly diagnoses Alexandre as a narcissist. It also tilts the film towards Veronika and away from Marie. Bernadette Lafont has fewer long soliloquies than Ms. Lebrun. Fortunately, the portraits of both women are fully drawn, as is the milieu. the hardscrabble nature of life after university is exactly portrayed as littered with whiskey bottles and beanbag chairs. The film illustrates the era where the counterculture was shifting from macrame to glitter. The ladies outfits are priceless for their funky chic and there is even a scene where Veronika applies makeup to Alexandre.

Though I'm sure it will render a large part of the population comatose, I thoroughly enjoyed La maman et la putain. I found it to be more erotic than such noted films from the era such as Last Tango in Paris and Shampoo, primarily because of Eustache's restraint, realism and self-awareness. Despite the surges of eros and thanatos in Last Tango..., do we really believe Brando's character is mourning his late wife? It seems to me that the film wallows in middle-aged male self-pity, as does Shampoo. When Warren Beatty's hairdresser loses Julie Christie, is it because of his philandering, Nixon or capitalism in general.? The makers slapped the chilled white whine of Paul Simon on the soundtrack to connote a vague sadness. Eustache uses music only when his characters put on a record. His technique verges on the primitive, but the concept and ending of this film are felt and deeply ambivalent. Is the conclusion of La maman et la putain happy or tragic?

                 

Bedsit Bohemians