Veronika’s sexual attitudes seem liberated, even though she doesn’t appear to have heard of “Women’s Lib” when Alexandre brings the topic up. When he explains what it is, she doesn’t seem impressed. “I like bringing a man I love breakfast in bed,” she says.
When the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas made a Top 10 list for the Criterion site, he included Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita. He said it summed up an era, a culture, a city. He said the film was of historical importance. “Maybe it is the great Italian film of that period, in the same way that The Mother and the Whore, by Jean Eustache, is the ultimate nouvelle vague film made ten years later, by someone who had been a marginal figure of the movement, and embodying a city, a time, a culture now all gone.”
“Marginal” may be right. The adjective pops up again in The Rough Guide to Film, which covers top studio moguls and filmmakers by era, genre and region. It labels Eustache the least-known of the great New Wave filmmakers, outside France. Heck, even a self-confessed fan like Michel Gondry, director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, didn’t know all that much about him. Gondry said he thought of Eustache’s My Little Loves when he made Microbe and Gasoline (2015), and added, “[he] was one of the greatest filmmakers in France, but he made maybe three or four movies.” Actually, Eustache made only two narrative features: the two films mentioned thus far.
Read the rest of this article here: https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/jean-eustaches-the-mother-and-the-whore-is-a-time-capsule-of-french-youth-post-civil-unrest-of-may-1968-8586521.html
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Baradwaj Rangan 
Ramit
July 13, 2020
The guy loves one woman, dates another, sleeps with the third one and talks of ideological purity. While I was trying to spot contradictions in his behavior, the movie details about another movie as saying it defines a new concept in human relations, which shows the main character’s obsessions and contradictions. And I realized this movie would be about the characters’ contradictions. And contradictions there were. Galore. Love Hate. Yes No. Breakup Patchup. The characters kept blowing hot and cold.
Of all the peculiarities of the guy, the most amusing one was his habit to bring shoes to his bed. He sits there, sleeps there, drinks there, fucks there. Yet, there were at least five scenes where he brings his shoes to the bed. No wonder there was an elaborate scene about changing the sheets.
Of the three girls, Veronica, of course, was the strangest one (cinematically). She says, “I get involved with people quickly and forget quickly. People don’t matter.” In one scene, she behaves as if people actually don’t exist. She is by the river with her date. They are sitting on a bench. She asks him to make love to her, right then, right there. He refuses saying they are being watched. Now, she could have suggested going to the room. Or, if she was insecure, she could have asked if he really liked her. Instead she asks, “Do you not like my breasts?”
When they finally get a room and the guy is trying to penetrate her under the sheets, she says she was using a Tampax and now it has gone inside and the guy would have to grope and take it out. I found it so funny, yet I wasn’t sure whether to laugh because the proceedings were so earnest. That guy came to my rescue when, in the middle of the sex, he says he is calling his friend to inform of this incident because it’s too funny to keep it just to himself.
This underhand comedy is another recurring feature of this movie. When the girl gives her car key to the guy, she says, “Be careful. The left indicator is broken. I have a system. I never take left turn.” And the scene ends there. I had to pause and absorb the absurdity of it. Similarly, when the guy goes to his friend’s house, locates a wheelchair, and asks where it came from. The friend says he stole it. From whom? From a cripple. That’s it. The conversation ends.
But I wasn’t expecting this light banter and breakups to lead to such a heavy, heady climax. Now, having read in the article above, about the suicide of the character and the director makes this movie all the more somber!
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