ABSTRACT
Eustache’s suicide deprived France of one of its major film-makers. The documentary style of his approach, as with Le Cochon of 1970, reaches its apotheosis in The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la putain) of 1973. More than three and a half hours of triangular emotional and sexual agonizing, in the literal sense of that word, in the flats and bars of St-Germain-des-Prés give Bernadette Lafont and above all Jean-Pierre Léaud perhaps their greatest roles. The film is an endlessly suggestive epitaph for the ‘generation of May 1968.’
