Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la Putain (The Mother and the Whore) is a film of mythic yet elusive proportions. It had a famous world premiere at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, where it attracted awards and opprobrium. It has long been regarded as one of French cinema’s singular, disconcerting masterpieces. Yet it has been slipping from view, rarely screened in theatres and unavailable on DVD or streaming services.

Finally, The Mother and the Whore has re-emerged, in a form that does justice to the look and sound of the original. It returned last year to the Croisette, newly remastered and presented as an officially sanctioned “Cannes Classic”. The first Australian screening of this version will be at Cinema Reborn, an annual Sydney festival of restored film treasures.

The body of Eustache’s work, for complicated rights reasons, has languished unrestored and in limbo, often circulating in grainy digital copies. This is the first example of what is to be a restoration of his complete filmography.

Eustache, born in 1938 in a working-class, rural district in the south of France, went to Paris as a young man and gravitated towards filmmaking. He got to know leading figures of the New Wave or Nouvelle Vague and shared many of their concerns and enthusiasms, without being considered one of their number. Much of his early work was in documentary. His short fictions were somewhat blunt explorations of masculinity.

The Mother and the Whore took things to another level. As director Olivier Assayas notes: “Suddenly, Eustache makes a film that every single director of the Nouvelle Vague had dreamed of making … It’s the ultimate Nouvelle Vague film, except that it doesn’t come from a Nouvelle Vague filmmaker.”

The first character we meet is a young man, Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who lives with and is supported by Marie (Bernadette Lafont) but remains fixated on a past relationship with Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten). At the same time he begins to pursue Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), who has caught his eye on the street.Gradually, over the course of 220 minutes, the film transforms into an increasingly dark, messy, relentless vision of a milieu of bleak sexual politics, disengagement and despair.

The Mother and the Whore comes both out of personal experience and from the act of representing it. As Eustache described the project: “I wrote this script because I loved a woman who left me. I wanted her to act in a film I had written … I wrote this film for her and for Léaud; if they had refused to play in it, I wouldn’t have written it.” Lebrun is the woman he is talking about, although the character she plays is based on someone else, a woman who makes a fleeting, uncredited appearance in the film. Alexandre is a figure who is close to Eustache in many ways. Other characters in the film are based on real people and dialogue is often drawn from conversations recorded and transcribed by the filmmaker.

Eustache was determined to use actual locations – not just the cafes and restaurants in the small, circumscribed area of Paris where the film takes place, but specific places that had meaning to him. He went to a great deal of trouble to be allowed to film in the stylish Gare de Lyon restaurant Le Train Bleu, succeeding where the likes of Orson Welles, John Huston and George Cukor had failed. When it came to shooting scenes in the nurses’ quarters where Veronika lives, he insisted they must use the room occupied by the woman on whom the character is based.

Authenticity is not a straightforward concept, however, but a loaded element in the world of the film and of its characters. Alexandre and his circle are fascinated by the idea of doubles and fakes, of the relationship between the fictional and the real. Supposedly chance encounters are orchestrated, rehearsed. Alexandre likes to scene-set, perform and direct his interactions with people, to turn his experiences into stories. Lafont called Eustache’s work “Les Liaisons dangereuses in the 20th century”.

The Mother and the Whore also has a complicated relationship with the past, with notions of nostalgia and memory. For Alexandre, there’s a sardonic idealising of aspects of the more distant past and also the expression of a kind of willed disenchantment with the present, an espousal of distance and forgetting. His cultural references are carefully braided into the conversation, on display.

The 4K restoration does justice to its visual style. There is an austere elegance to the black-and-white images, the use of fade-ins and fade-outs, the careful framing. But it is also a film in which sound is important: it is, after all, a work focused on voice, dialogue and discourse, on listening to the radio and playing records, paying attention to the words that people speak.

Words, for some critics of the film, were a source of distress, whether it was the language used by Veronika in particular, the repetition of swear words and slang, or the extended, self-indulgent declarations that Alexandre can produce almost at will. Sometimes his denunciations seem purely for effect, sometimes they appear to be genuine recollections or positions. Léaud told an interviewer he tried “to get a little humility into the performance, to play down his more objectionable side”, adding that he “admired what Eustache was doing, the critical view of human behaviour that he was trying to get across”.

But Alexandre’s almost compulsive use of language is gradually exposed and found wanting, as Veronika’s fierce, self-lacerating frankness, mesmerisingly depicted by Lebrun, takes hold of the film.

Eustache wrote long, intense monologues for his characters that Léaud, in particular, found challenging to memorise and perform – and the filmmaker was aggressively strict about sticking to the exact text. It is not immediately obvious that the work is tightly scripted, however, although Alexandre’s observations and gambits have the air of well-practised routines. Yet there is not a hint of improvisational looseness. Even in the final stages, as the characters are starting to break and fall apart, there’s a discipline and direction to the filmmaking and its inexorable focus.

Australian filmmaker James Vaughan (Friends and Strangers), who saw the restoration of The Mother and the Whore at Cannes last year, was struck by the experience of seeing it in a cinema. He was surprised by how funny it could be – the audience was quick to laugh from the very beginning – but also by how effortlessly it played out.

“It’s the fastest three hours, 40 minutes you can spend in a cinema for a film that’s so drifting and aimless,” he says. “I don’t think you can have that experience without it being carefully and cleverly structured and composed below the surface.” He was also struck by the contrasting performance styles and their incorporation into the world of the film. He sees “a special alchemy” in the way that “a naturalism and a theatricality seem
to coexist”.

This new version includes a brief scene that had been cut from a 1982 re-release that followed Eustache’s death a year earlier. It shows Marie and Alexandre going to the cinema, where they watch a 1968 movie, Les idoles, a satirical look at the French yé-yé pop scene. There is a self-referential aspect to this citation: Eustache had edited the film, and Lafont had a small role in it. Among those who champion The Mother and the Whore and its new life, opinions on the inclusion of the scene are divided: as always with Eustache, even the smallest detail can provoke debate.

The Mother and the Whore will be shown on April 27 at the Cinema Reborn festival at Ritz Cinemas, Randwick, NSW.

ARTS DIARY

VISUAL ART Belonging: Stories from Far North Queensland

National Museum of Australia, Canberra, until August 13

INSTALLATION Crossing

Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart, until April 30

MUSICAL Working: Localized!

Cremore Theatre, Brisbane, April 27-29

CULTURE Barka: The Forgotten River

Australian Museum, Sydney, until July 23

THEATRE Every Brilliant Thing

Adelaide Festival Centre, April 28–May 13

LAST CHANCE

OPERA Oratorio

His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth, until April 22

MUSIC Vedic Vibe

Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne, April 22

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