The Mother and the Whore (La maman et la putain) is a 3 hour, 36 minute 1973 film from France directed by Jean Eustache.
Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is a jobless young man in his late twenties. He can afford to be jobless in Paris because he is sponging off his lover, Marie, who owns a clothing store. Living with Marie does not stop Alexandre from chasing women all over the place. For her part Marie, who is in her mid-thirties, is pretty shockingly unbothered by her younger lover's constant cheating, usually expressing only mild irritation when he comes home late from a tryst.
One day Alexandre leaves Marie's bed, seeks out an old girlfriend named Gilberte, and asks her to marry him. Gilberte rejects him, and Alexandre is regrouping in a cafe when he catches the eye of lovely Veronika. Veronika, a blonde-haired, sexually adventurous nurse (she wants sex on a park bench!) and Alexandre are soon having a passionate affair, while he's still living with and sleeping with Marie. Marie knows about Veronika from the beginning and Veronika eventually finds out about Marie. Alexandre and his two women soon form a threesome, but tensions and jealousies still roil the group.
Tropes:
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: Alexandre observes that "women who have good guys always cheat with creeps", but he doesn't seem to realize how much that saying applies to him.
- All Take and No Give: In one of her too-rare moments of clarity, Marie observes of Alexandre that "what you do well is drain people." Alexandre is getting sex from both Marie and Veronika and even manages to get them both into a ménage, but he seems incapable of providing the real love they're both looking for.
- Babies Ever After: At the end it's Veronika's turn to stalk out of the ménage in a rage. Alexandre pursues her to the nursing dorm, where she tells him that she's pregnant but she doesn't want anything from him. He asks her to marry him and she agrees, but since the film ends immediately after this with Veronika vomiting into a bowl while a stunned Alexandre does a Wall Slump to the floor, it doesn't seem like much of a happy ending.
- Call-Back: A couple of scenes early in the film have Alexandre trying and failing to win back an old girlfriend, Gilberte, who eventually tells him she's engaged. Later in the movie as Alexandre and Veronika are liquor-shopping, they pass by Gilberte and her fiancé/husband in the grocery store.
- The Casanova: Alexandre is unemployed and kind of boring but is nonetheless shockingly successful with women. He is stringing Marie and Veronika along at the same time and nearly picks up a third girl in a cafe.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The entire film is shot in black and white.
- Fanservice: Lots of nudity from Marie, who doesn't think strolling around her own apartment naked is a big deal. Also, the amount of close ups on Jean Pierre Leaud, who was indeed the male darling of French New Wave at the time
- Hypocrite: Alexandre has innumerable one-night stands and eventually gets Marie to accept Veronika in their relationship as a ménage, but he flips his lid and stalks out when Marie invites an old boyfriend over to their party.
- It's All About Me: How self-centered is Alexandre? He starts humping Veronika in their ménage bed, only for Marie, who winds up being excluded, to jump out of bed and dramatically swallow a bunch of sleeping pills. Alexandre hustles Marie into the bedroom, gets her to vomit up the pills...and then gets back into bed and climbs on top of Veronika again. (And after first pushing him off in amazement, Veronika gives in!)
- Leave the Camera Running: A 219-minute movie that is mostly people talking has a lot of that talking occurring in long, static shots. The famous scene where the end where a crying Veronika goes on a long rant about how it's wrong to call a woman without sex a "whore", and how she just wants a man to love her, is presented in a five-minute take without a cut or camera movement. This is followed very soon after where a depressed Marie puts a record on the phonograph and listens to Édith Piaf song "Les Amants de Paris" in its entirety, again without a cut or camera movement.
- Madonna-Whore Complex: Gives the movie its title. Marie is the "mother"—older, more understanding and indulgent, basically being both mom and lover for Alexandre—while Veronika is the very slutty "whore".
- No Periods, Period: Averted. Veronika has to take out her Tampax for sex with Alexandre, and the next morning there are drops of blood on the carpet.
- The Noun and the Noun: The Mother and the Whore
- Perfumigation: Marie gives Alexandre a hard time about his cologne, wincing and saying "You smell like 'Bandit'! I hate that scent!"
- Polyamory: Amazingly, Alexandre gets both Marie and Veronika to live together in a ménage with him. It starts breaking down at the end.
- Really Gets Around: At one point Veronika says "Oh, I'm easy to pick up, as you know." She tells Alexandre how after she came to the cafe and found him talking to his old girlfriend, she picked up another man and went to his place for sex. Later she basically admits she's a slut, telling stories about all the men she's had, telling Alexandre about how she asked a doctor at her hospital to have sex with her just because she wanted to lose her virginity. However this is all subverted by a long scene towards the end where a crying Veronika rejects the very idea of the "whore", saying that sex without love is meaningless and the only sex that's worthwhile is lovemaking between people in love, for the purpose of children.
- Shout-Out: Alexandre the pseudo-intellectual likes to drop cultural references.
- He looks from their restaurant, which has a view of the city from one side and outgoing trains on the other side, and tells Veronika that it's like an F. W. Murnau movie about going from the city to the country.
- He reminisces about an old friend with a mutual acquaintance, saying the old friend bore a strong resemblance to Jean-Paul Belmondo.
- He describes dreaming of a bunch of people leaving the city with their stuff in Bindle Sticks and says it was like a Charlie Chaplin movie.
- Speech-Centric Work: A 3-hour, 39-minute movie about people talking about their feelings and their desires and sex.
- Suicide by Pills: When Marie gets excluded from Veronika and Alexandre's lovemaking, she gets up and swallows a bunch of pills. It's not fully clear whether she actually intended to kill herself or was simply acting out to get attention. Either way, it doesn't work as Alexandre, after forcing Marie to throw up the pills, goes right back to getting it on with Veronika.
- Spiteful Spit: Alexandre is sitting in his car and sulking after Marie invited a man over for their party. An outraged Marie stalks over to the car, raps on the window, and spits at him after he rolls it down.
- Take That!: Alexandre sarcastically reads an ad for Palme d'Or-winning film The Working Class Go To Heaven, and pronounces it "stupidity".
- A Threesome Is Hot: Well it is hot when Veronika and Marie start kissing in bed and Alexandre joins in. Becomes a lot less hot later when Marie gets excluded from Veronika and Alexandre's lovemaking and winds up swallowing a bunch of pills.
