Michael Neumann
The title is meant to represent the sexist ideal of womanhood, for all men in general and, in the shell-shocked aftermath of the 1960s, for the hapless Jean-Pierre Leaud in particular. The young protagonist idles away most of this formidably long but rewarding French import in the company of various friends and lovers, all of them flotsam from the social/sexual revolutions, unable to stop even the simplest relationship from souring into a narcissistic war of attrition. It's a challenging film, and more so in subtitles because the drama is entirely verbal, expressed in a series of weird, attenuated soliloquies about everything from cinema to suicide to lemonade to flannel. Most of the talk is quite engaging, despite the often lackadaisical pre-Slacker irrelevance (delivered at punishing length); only during the final half hour (or so) does repetition and ennui set in. In the end everything is explained but nothing is resolved, and the story comes full circle to deposit Leaud in exactly the same predicament he began it: proposing to a woman who doesn't want to bear his child.
moimoichan6
"La Maman et la putain" is the beautifulest film of all time. And what's most moving about it may be the relation between reality and art the movie deals with, which is directly inspired by Proust's "A la Recherche du temps perdu".Indeed, "La Maman et la putain" and "In search of lost time" apparently tell the same story : the one of the failure of love, which repeats itself endlessly. The first woman's name is always Gilberte, and the second woman appears like a twisted and deformed double of Gilberte : Veronika is like a "whore Gilberte", beautiful like the night, whereas Gilberte was pure, and "beautiful like the day". After the failure of the first love, a second love begins, but this one is like already doomed by the first one. Veronika takes the place of Gilberte, in Alexandre's life and in the movie. She progressively eclipses her, first by time to time, Gilberte's still coming when Alexandre waits for Veronika,then totally. That shows it's the same sad story repeating itself, the same "unfaithful woman", like Alexandre says, who appears endlessly - and unfaithful is for Proust the higher point in love, which makes it exist, but which also underlines its illusions.Art is what causes the passage between what's outside - the illusion of love - to what's inside, which is the truth, and is a learning of this truth. For instance, when Veronika notices the strange way Alexandre makes is bed, he answers that he saw it in a movie, and then, that a movie, "it's made for that, to learn how to live, how to make a bed". Alexander wants to live like he was in a film, he wants his life to be art. This conception of art comes from Proust, with whom Eustache shares the same rejection of "political art" and realism in art. "La Maman et la putain" fights against a conception of art "principaly political" - see for example the ironical review of a political movie by Alexandre. Like Proust says : "Art doesn't care for all this proclamations, and only exists in silence." First of all, art is introspection. And that also why realism or naturalism is rejected : art needs to transform reality to exist. Proust writes : "I discover the illusion of realism, which is a lie". That's why "La Maman et la putain" doesn't hide its artificiality, underlines by the way the actors "say" their text : "the more you seem artificial, the higher you go", said Eustache.Eustache and Proust both share this idea that the artist is a "translater" of a inner truth. But, Alexandre failed where Eustache succeed. "La Maman et la putain" tells us the failure of a character to be what he truly is. You can sens the tragedy arise when you go further in the movie, which becomes saddest. You can see it in the face of Alexandre, who looks more and more like a living-dead. You can see it by the fact that the scenes become longer, and that after a while, nothing happens outside. At the end of the movie, when you see Alexandre writing, and Veronika asking if he's writing his life,you can guess that he's not, that even literature failed. The end of the movie shows the symbolic death of Alexander, who is smashes by the heaviness of reality. And in this tiny nurse's room, Alexandre looks more like Albertine than Marcel.To explain this failure, we can say that Alexandre is a Balzac's reader. In "Forme et signification", Jean Rousset explains that, in Proust's, the readers of Balzac, who are Swann and Charlus, are unable of any artistic creation, because they're stuck in reality, which they mistake with art. They see reality in art and "are not aware of the transformations that necessarily exist between the life of an artist and his work, between reality and art". And that's exactly Alexandre. He claims for instance that he "loves a woman for parallel reasons, because she played in a Bresson's for example". He's like Swann, who falls in love with Odette because she looks like a Botticelli's woman."Life is perhaps not my vocation". This thought is indeed by Eustache, who committed suicide, even if it's said by Alexandre. Nevertheless, there is a difference between Alexandre and Eustache : if Eustache is absolutely Alexandre, Alexandre is like a double without art, a horrible vision of the artist, which crystallizes his fears.By fallowing Veronika at the end of the movie, Alexandre is condemned to illusions. It's death that remind me the last frames of the movie, in the face of Jean-Pierre Léaud as well as in the endless pucking of Veronika. Or maybe it is already hell that describes the end, like in Sarte's "Huit-Clot", and absolutely not like in the final liberation of "Le Temps retrouvé". If Eustache had read Proust, Alexandre could never have finish the book , always perturbed by life and Veronika when he tries to read it at his apartment or in the cafés. "La Maman et la Putain" is like a inverse double of "In search of lost times", which tells how Alexander doesn't become an artist, whereas "A la Recherche du temps perdu" tells how Marcel becomes a writer (Genette).If, like Baudelaire says, an artiste tells "reality at the light of his dream", it is his nightmare that Eustache tells us in "La Maman et la putain".
silviu gherman
this movie is so complex that it can be given any description and still roll with it. you have a insecure, troubled and fascinating main character (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) who is trapped between two (no, three) women. we listen to his social, philosophical and moral idiosyncrasies in interminable monologues, we see him working his magic around the three women that he loves. this could be the premise for a fowl movie, full of rigid, cold, uninteresting commentaries. yet director Jean Eustache manages to keep it fresh, ironic and witty. being such a long movie, one cannot but burst into laughing when, after 2 hours of speaking politely, Jean-Pierre Léaud all of a sudden screams on the phone while he remembers a cheesy line from a movie. this kind of situations are purely cinematographic and cannot be fully restored in a commentary. nor can someone restore the tragic and painfully beautiful monologue of Françoise Lebrun towards the end of the movie. 3 and 1/2 hours and worthing every minute.
