The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache

The new 4K restoration that premiered in Cannes last year just a few months after Les films du Losange announced that it had acquired the entire Eustache catalog now arrives in the States courtesy of Janus Films and opens tomorrow at Film at Lincoln Center in New York. The Mother and the Whore will run for three weeks as part of the twelve-film series The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache; the other eleven titles will screen during the third week, from July 7 through 13.

At the end of a ten-year, on-again, off-again relationship with Françoise Lebrun, Eustache, drawing on surreptitiously recorded conversations, wrote the screenplay and asked Lebrun to play Veronika, a nurse who guiltlessly enjoys sex. Veronika catches the eye of Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who has just proposed to—and been rejected by—Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten) even though he’s still living with Marie (Bernadette Lafont), who puts up with his pseudo-intellectual logorrhea, his flings with other women, and his freeloading because she loves him.

“As Alexandre regularly monopolizes conversations to rant about oversexualized culture, the failure of progressive politics, and other such topics, a portrait of the young man emerges that’s possibly far more recognizable in 2023 than it was in 1973,” suggests Jake Cole at Slant. “Despite all of his sexual dalliances, Alexandre’s repressive views of women’s role as subservient to men and the manner in which he expresses these notions marks him as a prototype of the modern incel. Likewise, his apostasy from his supposed progressivism of his younger days recalls the increasingly common ‘post-left’ figure who trollishly embraces the most reactionary politics possible as ‘true’ rebellion.”

Writing about Eustache for the Village Voice in 2000, Amy Taubin noted that The Mother and the Whore “shares and bares the anxiety about masculinity that fuels American films of the ’70s from Carnal Knowledge to Taxi Driver, not to mention John Cassavetes’s oeuvre—an anxiety exacerbated by the so-called sexual-liberation movement and the subsequent rise of feminist consciousness.” Nick Pinkerton, who’s currently at work on a critical biography of Eustache for Film Desk Books, surveyed the career for Moving Image Source in 2008 and observed that this film is “not a work that solves itself, but a flagellating self-analysis, wrenched and wracked with indecisions. And that it is at once of the counterculture and against it, cross-examining the assumptions of ‘self-liberation,’ is precisely what makes the film essential.”

In 1997, Luc Beraud, who had worked as Eustache’s assistant director on The Mother and the Whore, told Joan Dupont in the New York Times that Jack Nicholson had been so impressed by this first feature that he put money into a second. My Little Loves (1974) is essentially the story of Eustache’s youth. He spent his early years in his grandmother’s house in Pessac, a small winemaking town in southwestern France, and his unhappier teens in Narbonne, living with his mother and her lover. “Lyrically photographed by Néstor Almendros, and wonderfully acted by Martin Loeb (who plays Daniel, Eustache’s childhood alter ego),” wrote Taubin, My Little Loves is the “most subtle of eye-openers” and “a far more rigorous coming-of-age film than The 400 Blows.”

“In Eustache’s loamy, holistic vision, the events are shaped less by the demands of drama than by the meanderings of consciousness itself,” wrote the New Yorker’s Richard Brody in 2016. “Eustache’s nuanced yet brazen view of the battle of the sexes—and of Daniel’s recruitment to its front lines—keeps the action tense even when the characters’ lives offer little forward motion. Loeb’s calm and intensely intelligent performance, the richly textured yet cool-eyed color cinematography, and the incisive dialogue combine to convey an extraordinary density of lived experience.”

When Eustache arrived in Paris in the 1950s, he began haunting the Cinémathèque française and the office of Cahiers du cinéma, working as an editor for French television, and taking on small roles in other directors’ films. He completed his own first film, Robinson’s Place, the story of two buddies who pursue a woman and steal her purse before sheepishly returning it, in 1963. Robinson’s Place “establishes Eustache’s attraction to anecdotal plots, tatty locales, and petty sadism,” wrote Pinkerton, but it’s Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (1966) “that finds his recognizable style crystallized.”

Jean-Luc Godard gave Eustache the film stock he hadn’t used while making Masculin féminin (1966) and lent him his star, Jean-Pierre Léaud, who plays a young man who discovers that the girls of Narbonne get a kick out of the Santa outfit he’s hired to wear. Throughout his career, Eustache made a good number of documentaries, including Numéro zéro (1971), a feature-length conversation with his grandmother, and two films about the annual ceremony in which the citizens of his hometown crown the community’s most virtuous young woman, The Virgin of Pessac (1968) and The Virgin of the Pessac ’79.

A Dirty Story (1977), the film that gives the FLC series its title, is an oddity in two parts. In one, Eustache’s friend and collaborator Jean-Noël Picq tells a group of women about discovering and taking full advantage of a peephole that gave him a secret view into a women’s restroom. Actor Michael Lonsdale performs the same story, and it’s this version that Eustache preferred to screen first.

Le cochon (1970), codirected with Jean-Michel Barjol, documents the slaughter of a pig in a rural village, and Pinkerton found that the “filmmaking is almost completely transparent, a model of cinematography fused to subject.” Le cochon is “an extraordinarily concentrated study in artisanal process.” The film “helped make his reputation,” Lebrun told Cannes’s Benoit Pavan last year, recalling the moment when Eustache “called me to ask if I’d agree to perform in his new film. I accepted without knowing what it was about or who the other actors were.”

Late in 1981, the prestigious French film school IDHEC screened a program of Eustache’s work. The director introduced My Little Loves, and the following evening, Lebrun was to have presented The Mother and the Whore. “I’ll tell you how it went,” Lebrun said to Joan Dupont. “The night between the two films, he shot a bullet through his heart.” A few days later, the renowned critic Serge Daney wrote in Libération that Eustache “held on to life only by a small number of threads, so solid that one thought them unbreakable. The desire for cinema was one of these threads. The desire not to have to film at any cost was another. This desire was a luxury and Eustache knew it. He would pay the price.”