The Mother and the Whore

The Mother and the Whore
Film poster of The Mother and the Whore
Directed by	Jean Eustache
Produced by	Vincent Malle Bob Rafelson
Written by	Jean Eustache
Starring	Bernadette Lafont Jean-Pierre Léaud Françoise Lebrun
Cinematography	Pierre Lhomme
Edited by	Denise de Casabianca Jean Eustache
Release date	May 1973 (1973-05) Cannes Film Festival
Running time	219 min
Country	France
Language	French
Budget	700,000 francs

The Mother and the Whore (French: La Maman et la Putain) is a 1973 French film directed by Jean Eustache. An examination of the relationships between three characters in a love triangle, it was Eustache's first feature film and is considered his masterpiece.
The film is freely available on the internet.

The film focuses on three twenty-somethings in an unconventional love triangle in Paris during the summer of 1972. Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is an unemployed young man involved with both a live-in girlfriend Marie (Bernadette Lafont) and the Polish nurse Veronika (Françoise Lebrun). He had picked up Veronika at a café after an unsuccessful reconciliation with a former love, Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten). With Veronika, he begins a desultory affair. Although Marie affirms her indifference to Alexandre's affairs, she quickly changes her mind when she sees how close he becomes to Veronika. This leads to a growing estrangement between her and Alexandre. The film focuses less on plot or narrative than on the confused and ambivalent lifestyles of these three young people in post-May '68 Paris.

In 1972 Eustache had begun to doubt his career in films and contemplated quitting the business. He told a reporter from Le Nouvel Observateur "If I knew what it was that I wanted, I wouldn't wake up in the morning to make films. I'd do nothing, I'd try to live without doing or producing anything." Soon afterwards he got a new idea for a film to make with his friends Jean-Pierre Léaud and Bernadette Lafont; he also brought in his ex-lover Françoise Lebrun who at that time was a literature student and had never acted before. Eustache was loaned money from friend Barbet Schroeder to spend three months writing the script, which was over three hundred pages. Although the film often seems to be highly improvised, every word of dialogue was written by Eustache. The film was very autobiographical and was inspired by Eustache's various relationships, such as his then recent breakup with Françoise Lebrun and romantic relationships with Marinka Matuszewsk and Catherine Garnier. Many of the locations used in the film were places that Garnier had lived or worked. The character played by Jacques Renard was based on Eustache's friend Jean-Jacques Schuhl.