The Mother and the Whore
A man with a seemingly limitless supply of charm uses it to pose as being open while keeping himself at a safe distance, but finds it increasingly difficult to handle two women. I suspect that two of the most interesting and worthwhile readings are Pauline Kael (1977), pp. 289–93, and Robert Kolker (1983), pp. 364–68. In both cases, the whole analysis should be read, but what they share is ambivalent admiration, and it’s hard to disagree. Like MEAN STREETS, from the same year, the film starts with a man waking up energetically: in both cases, the question is whether he truly does wake up, what kind of desperate energy is forcing him out of bed, and what the film is telling us about that.
Kael says, “some will consider Veronika’s ultimate monologue cathartic”, but that for her, “it was as if Alexandre were pressured into confessing a crime he hadn’t committed”, that he “assumes the guilt for all the men whom this obsessive woman has landed in bed with and then felt lacerated by”, so that the movie turns out to be “about the penance that must be done for sex-without-love”, Kael asking whether she isn’t really saying she wants to be loved, and concluding that the film “is designed to be a religious experience, but the musty answer it offers to the perils of sexual freedom is actually a denial of sexual freedom” (292–93). She most certainly has a point: after all, doesn’t it all end up with Veronika’s diatribe against all sex that is not between a couple in love who want a baby? What really should we think about that?
Kolker sees the film as marking a shift in European cinema, and one that, beneath its apparent radicality, “reveals a very safe and somewhat reactionary perspective”, where “characters close themselves in, forget the world, and look to the self as refuge”, “characters who have forgotten they exist in the world and have chosen to retreat into their sexual insecurities”, sealed “into a hermetic world in which they talk their lives out without achieving a coherent discourse”, Alexandre ending up “unrooted and without direction, trapped by the vagaries of subjectivity, a careless regard for himself and others, without reason for his condition beyond an almost terminal self-absorption”, Kolker concluding that it is a film that “can only reveal emptiness, an emotional and intellectual vacuum” (365–68). Such a reading, and such a conclusion, seem to avoid the question of whether this shift in cinema, if it exists, marked and therefore revealed by this film, reflects a shift in the world itself, and if so, whether Eustache’s self-absorbed characters, hermetically sealed in their sexual insecurities, are victims of a form of suffering that absolutely demands to be brought into the light of day.
After all, Eustache knows perfectly well that what these characters from is disorientation that they cannot seem to escape. Here he is, commenting on his feelings about the film in Porter (1986), p. 95:
”The main reason why I have never liked THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE was because I felt provoked and attacked when I made it. I had always wanted to make the film that was to become MES PETITES AMOUREUSES but I couldn’t raise the money for it. I chose to make THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE because it only required a minimal budget of 700,000 francs. The fury with which I made the film was assimilated into its structure and theme: the length was provocative and the title, and I portrayed beautiful young people who were desperate because time was passing them by. They could find no explanation for their predicament.”
Even so, it is also hard to deny that the film is exhausting, and that the last hour, precisely the hour of the whore’s tragic monologue, drains all the energy out of the film and out of the viewer, in a manner that unintentionally forces the audience to confront the question of whether this purification ritual is something they can either believe in or want. In this film, we see things about the way men and women relate to one another that were not shown in any previous film and which will hardly be shown ever again. And yet, ultimately, it is a film hard to like: ambivalent admiration.
Kael says, “some will consider Veronika’s ultimate monologue cathartic”, but that for her, “it was as if Alexandre were pressured into confessing a crime he hadn’t committed”, that he “assumes the guilt for all the men whom this obsessive woman has landed in bed with and then felt lacerated by”, so that the movie turns out to be “about the penance that must be done for sex-without-love”, Kael asking whether she isn’t really saying she wants to be loved, and concluding that the film “is designed to be a religious experience, but the musty answer it offers to the perils of sexual freedom is actually a denial of sexual freedom” (292–93). She most certainly has a point: after all, doesn’t it all end up with Veronika’s diatribe against all sex that is not between a couple in love who want a baby? What really should we think about that?
Kolker sees the film as marking a shift in European cinema, and one that, beneath its apparent radicality, “reveals a very safe and somewhat reactionary perspective”, where “characters close themselves in, forget the world, and look to the self as refuge”, “characters who have forgotten they exist in the world and have chosen to retreat into their sexual insecurities”, sealed “into a hermetic world in which they talk their lives out without achieving a coherent discourse”, Alexandre ending up “unrooted and without direction, trapped by the vagaries of subjectivity, a careless regard for himself and others, without reason for his condition beyond an almost terminal self-absorption”, Kolker concluding that it is a film that “can only reveal emptiness, an emotional and intellectual vacuum” (365–68). Such a reading, and such a conclusion, seem to avoid the question of whether this shift in cinema, if it exists, marked and therefore revealed by this film, reflects a shift in the world itself, and if so, whether Eustache’s self-absorbed characters, hermetically sealed in their sexual insecurities, are victims of a form of suffering that absolutely demands to be brought into the light of day.
After all, Eustache knows perfectly well that what these characters from is disorientation that they cannot seem to escape. Here he is, commenting on his feelings about the film in Porter (1986), p. 95:
”The main reason why I have never liked THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE was because I felt provoked and attacked when I made it. I had always wanted to make the film that was to become MES PETITES AMOUREUSES but I couldn’t raise the money for it. I chose to make THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE because it only required a minimal budget of 700,000 francs. The fury with which I made the film was assimilated into its structure and theme: the length was provocative and the title, and I portrayed beautiful young people who were desperate because time was passing them by. They could find no explanation for their predicament.”
Even so, it is also hard to deny that the film is exhausting, and that the last hour, precisely the hour of the whore’s tragic monologue, drains all the energy out of the film and out of the viewer, in a manner that unintentionally forces the audience to confront the question of whether this purification ritual is something they can either believe in or want. In this film, we see things about the way men and women relate to one another that were not shown in any previous film and which will hardly be shown ever again. And yet, ultimately, it is a film hard to like: ambivalent admiration.
Mini Review: A man with a seemingly limitless supply of charm uses it to pose as being open while keeping himself at a safe distance, but finds it increasingly difficult to handle two women. I suspect that two of the most interesting and worthwhile readings are Pauline Kael (1977), pp. 289–93, and Robert Kolker (1983), pp. 364–68. In both cases, the whole analysis should be read, but what they share is ambivalent admiration, and it’s hard to disagree.
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