La maman et la putain

Alexandre, a young man who has chosen a life of idleness as a way of opposing bourgeois society, spends his time in cafés engaged in conversation and reading Proust. He lives with Marie (Bernadette Lafont), but cannot forget his former lover Gilberte. When he meets a nurse named Véronika, a ménage-à-trois ensues, culminating in a suicide attempt. Jean Eustache’s masterpiece is rightly regarded as one of the most important French films of the 1970s. The film is at once a study of three individuals, the micro-society in the area of Paris-St-Germain-des-Prés and French society as a whole in the wake of the trauma of May ’68. The fact that Eustache’s bitter swan song to this significant event seems timeless nonetheless is due to the universality of many of the themes it addresses: the longing for a different sort of life, the search for love, the enigmatic nature of emotions, the difficulty of living (and living with others) and death. (hjf)