"The Mother and the Whore" (1973) indulges a French ménage-à-trois

French New Wave writer/director Jean Eustache grabbed attention in 1973 with “The Mother and the Whore” which won the prestigious Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix. Largely autobiographical, Eustache focuses on three individuals, all friends he enlisted for a candid, explicit foregrounding of sexual relationships: Jean-Pierre Léaud as Alexandre, Françoise Lebrun as Veronika, and Bernadette Lafont as Marie.

This trio, anchored by Alexandre, channel Eustache’s volatile, past affair with Lebrun as Veronika, a free love advocate who embraces sexuality in her behavior and descriptions, at times quite crude. Factored in, Alexandre’s on-again, off-again lover Marie comes and goes from the Parisian flat she and Alexandre still share. It’s all a bit complicated, but the narrative, such as it is, focuses on Alexandre who, for just over three and a half hours, holds forth on all his narcissistic reactions to his world, at times offering insightful commentary: on suicide, holding on to pain, not wanting to change.

More often, he comes across as annoyingly arrogant with his thorough self-absorption, lacking perspective and social filters. He rambles on, often directly addressing the camera in long takes that feel improvised but were, in fact, all scripted. At one point Alexandre revealingly comments, “I’m sure all recent world events were directed against me: Cultural Revolution, May ’68, the Rolling Stones, long hair, Black Panthers, Palestinians, the Underground. And then, nothing.”

Eustache described the film as “a narrative of . . . the way in which important actions situate themselves in a continuum of innocuous . . . events without the schematic abbreviation of cinematographic dramatization.” Critical opinion varied, from “an insult to the nation” and “a monument of boredom and a Himalaya of pretension” to “raw truth . . . including the boring and the trivial.” The film has since been praised for its “intimate disasters,” and there are several earned meltdowns.

In black and white and  in French with English subtitles, “The Mother and the Whore” screens at Webster University’s Winifred Moore auditorium Friday, July 21 through Sunday, July 23 at 7:00 each of those evenings. For more information, you may visit the film series website.