Directed by Jean Eustache • 1973 • France
Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Françoise Lebrun, Isabelle Weingarten

After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May 1968 came THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache that captures, through the microcosm of a ménage à trois, a disillusioned generation navigating the 1970s. The aimless, clueless Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a dalliance with the younger, sexually liberated Veronika (Françoise Lebrun, Eustache’s own former lover), leading to a volatile open relationship marked by everyday emotional violence and subtle but catastrophic shifts in power dynamics. Transmitting his own sex life to the screen with a startling immediacy, Eustache achieves an intimacy so deep, it cuts.