1.
Cafés, cramped rooms and
bottles of whiskey; tangled
arrangements: Léaud rants.
The lines above form one of the inadequate haikus I’ve started to write about each film I see. It obviously tries (and, I must say, fails) to convey something about Jean Eustache’s La maman et la putain (1973), which I’d been waiting to revisit for quite a while, given that my first viewing, some years ago, was far from ideal. It was a digital projection of the VHS version of the film with badly superimposed Spanish subtitles over the English ones (which sometimes froze for minutes at a time, making it impossible to follow the course of several of Jean-Pierre Léaud’s arguments, which, as my terrible haiku attests, are crucial to a reading of this film); not only that, but I was also quite exhausted at the beginning of the screening and I can’t say that I didn’t doze off briefly on a few occasions. In any case, I’ve now seen the film again, in basically the same form (sans Spanish text), and it blew me away once more. The other reason I had for wanting to re-watch it (beyond the pleasure I knew it would afford me) was as a form of preparation towards exploring both Eustache’s other films (none of which I’ve seen, though I will soon catch up with Mes petites amoreuses [1974] as well as his shorter works) and also some of the longer narrative French films of the early 1970s, specifically Jacques Rivette’s, whose twelve-hour Out 1 (1971) also stars Léaud.
2.
In his review of the film published in the mid-1970s, Jonathan Rosenbaum succinctly describes the setting and subject of La maman et la putain the following way: “From the Café aux Deux Magots to the adjacent Flore, from the streets and sidewalks of a grayish Paris to other people’s flats, for the better part of 219 minutes, Alexandre continues to hold forth.” Alexandre does speak about basically every topic imaginable, so that it’s not at all surprising when he gets around to referencing a great deal of films and filmmakers. On his first date with Veronika (Françoise Lebrun, luminous in her acting debut), a woman he is pursuing while living with Marie (the marvelous Bernadette Lafont, who recently passed away), he tells her that he “might like a woman because she was in a Bresson film.” Indeed, in an earlier scene we had seen him pestering an ex-girlfriend played by Isabelle Weingarten, who had an important role in Bresson’s adaption of the Dostoevsky novella “White Nights” titled Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (1971). Veronika, too, is largely inexpressive and blank for the duration of La maman et la putain (the notable exception being her amazing speech towards the end of the film, made all the more resonant in comparison to her usual behavior) despite being very frank about her fears and desires; no wonder the one time we see her smile it is because Alexandre has expressly asked her to, and the brief moment registers as a shock. Elsewhere, then, Alexandre mentions Murnau and Nicholas Ray, berates rich directors who think they are contributing something to the world and questions Veronika’s honesty by suggesting that, in a bad film, some of her statements might be termed “the message” of the work.
3.
Duration, the passage of time, is a key part of the film; its three-and-a-half-hour running time is not incidental to its purpose, but rather its very essence. What makes possible its descent into madness and hysteria in the last thirty minutes are precisely the preceding three hours where nothing really happens (which is, of course, another way of saying that everything happens, that nothing is singled out the better to let multitudes find their way in, just as Alexandre says that talking a lot or not at all are basically the same thing). There’s a narrative, sure, guided primarily by Léaud’s presence (his voice and mannerisms) in every single scene, but not very much of what passes for “conflict” in most films (the characters, especially Alexandre and Marie, bicker and all, but they quickly laugh it off and go on to their growingly divergent paths), so that the accumulation of minor incidents, encounters and moments add up to a richly detailed and minutely observed portrait of tedium (with its flashes of excitement) and Time as such; something finally snaps, of course, and it has to be one of the most shattering rhetorical shifts in the history of film, at once frightening and all-too-uncertain, culminating in that last despairing image of Alexandre, utterly defeated.
