The Mother and the Whore: Lovers of Paris

The affectation certainly fits Alexandre, who is literary in an old-fashioned way, in love with his orotundities, although he is sufficiently modern to be cinematically literate. In 1972, the bookstores were filled with the classics of anarchism and revolt, but Alexandre gives Gilberte a book by the unstoppable nineteenth-century moralizer for children, the Comtesse de Ségur. He self-justifyingly cites Georges Bernanos, the tormented ex-Catholic novelist whose works have inspired a passel of great movies (Mouchette, Diary of a Country Priest, Under the Sun of Satan): “I write in cafés because I can’t long deprive myself of human faces and voices.” Eustache noted his own influences on the film both literary (Flaubert, Céline) and cinematic (Jean Renoir, Marcel Pagnol). But its only glimpse of contemporary culture is a fleeting erotico-psychedelic ritual performed by Bulle Ogier, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, and Pierre Clémenti (the trio who made Les idoles in 1968).

As Alexandre and Veronika’s affair proceeds, we see him becoming increasingly possessive—he’s that way with Marie, too, stalking out of their dinner party after learning that she has invited an old lover of hers. Veronika develops a tendency to call Alexandre and Marie from some club, wasted drunk, in the middle of the night, after they are asleep. Then she starts coming over and inserting herself between them in their bed. The second time this happens, Marie swallows a bottle of sleeping pills. After Alexandre induces her to vomit, she throws the lovers out. In a café, Veronika tells Alexandre that she has seen a toilet graffito that reminds her of him: “My rage for love opens onto death the way a window opens onto a courtyard.” By that point, Veronika has seized the narrative from Alexandre and become the main character.

One day shortly thereafter, when Veronika is over, she states baldly that Alexandre was only attracted to her because of her blond hair and blue eyes, thinking he’d found a new Gilberte, but instead of a virginal Gilberte he found an old-whore Gilberte. Marie understands, and rallies to her. Drunk and fighting tears, Veronika launches on a long, circular, hypnotic, cathartic rant: “For me, there are no whores. For me, a girl who gets fucked by anybody, in any manner, is not a whore. For me, there are no whores, that’s all. You can suck whatever you want, you can get fucked by just anybody, you are not a whore.” Alexandre and Veronika leave the apartment, and we stay with Marie there as she listens to the entirety of Édith Piaf’s “Les amants de Paris.” Alexandre and Veronika wind up in her room in the hospital. She is pregnant, and it may be his. Shaking her, Alexandre proposes marriage, and she says yes, laughing hysterically. Then she vomits into a basin.

The Mother and the Whore is elaborately autobiographical. Eustache had years before been romantically involved with Lebrun (“I wrote the script because I loved a woman who had left me”), then with the model for Veronika, a Polish nurse named Marinka Matuszewski (who makes a cameo appearance as a woman Alexandre early on mistakes for Veronika). Renard’s character was closely modeled on one of Eustache’s friends, the writer Jean-Jacques Schuhl. Eustache had more recently been involved with Catherine Garnier, the model for Marie, whose apartment and dress shop were employed as the sets for Marie’s—and who was also the costumer and makeup artist and typed up script revisions. Garnier killed herself right after the first screening. Afterward Eustache spent some time in a rest home. The film is dedicated to her.

But there was a funerary aspect to Eustache’s conception from the start. He was carving a beautiful tombstone for his generation. History may be immobilized, but time marches on. Alexandre meets an old acquaintance in a café and remembers that guy you’d see around, who was the exact double of Jean-Paul Belmondo—whatever happened to him? And then comes a list of disappearances, suicides, moves to America. As the critic Serge Daney wrote, regarding Eustache’s characters, “Without him, nothing would have remained of them.” Alexandre, Marie, Veronika, the friend—each of them is based on a real person, but each also stands for thousands of others, types of their generation, found in every café on the street until they disappear or fade away.

The casting is such that you cannot imagine anyone but Léaud, Lebrun, and Lafont in their roles. Lafont, in her midthirties then, had navigated the passage from hot number (in Truffaut’s 1957 Les mistons and Chabrol’s 1958 Le beau Serge) to splendid agelessness—sexy, watchful, and crisply articulate. Every major performance by Léaud since his appearance at fourteen in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) has been another chapter in the life of a character, sometimes called Antoine Doinel, who negotiates with his times in a highly wrought language of words, postures, and stances, and his role here is a Doinel who is self-absorbed to the point of truculence. Lebrun was a revelation in her part, having made only a couple of appearances on film; Eustache didn’t at first think she had it in her. She has since enjoyed a rich ongoing career in movies, television, and the theater.

Eustache insisted on his script being delivered word for word, with no rehearsals and no deviations. In fact, the speeches by Marie and Veronika were often direct transcriptions from their models—“transcriptions made coldly but in the heat of the moment, in the first café he saw,” wrote his last companion, Sylvie Durastanti. Veronika’s language, with its profusion of slang, became a focus of controversy upon the film’s release, and many major critics panned it for that reason. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, although the jury’s president, Ingrid Bergman, hated the picture and dissented. The division seems to have been generational. The elders didn’t understand, but younger viewers saw themselves reflected. Eustache wrote: “It’s the only one of my films I hate, because it forces me to confront myself, a self that is too present. The distance in my other films protects me.” As Daney wrote, “Eustache resembled his times too much to be comfortable.”

Afterward he made one more feature, My Little Loves (1974)—an idyllic evocation of his rural youth, in color and nearly silent—which was widely panned, at least in part because it was so different from its predecessor. He made a few more shorts and planned other projects. He appeared as the very coolest of all the cool directors with cameos in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend (1977). His legend grew as his career shrank. Eustache was not bankable because of the failure of his last picture. But The Mother and the Whore was taken very personally by a large percentage of its viewers, who would revisit the movie every few years to measure their present selves against it. And filmmakers obsessively studied the film, trying to measure whatever schematic allowed 218 minutes to sail by, almost in one breath. And by his very absence from the scene, Eustache unwittingly contributed to his mystique. On a trip to Greece in 1981, he fell from a parapet and broke his leg. Immobilized for months, and learning that he would henceforth walk with a limp, he plunged into depression, and shot himself in the heart on November 5 of that year. On his door, he left a note: “Knock loud. As if to wake the dead.” In Eustache’s obituary in Libération, Daney wrote: “His death upsets but does not surprise us.”