Rachel Kushner and Jean-Pierre Gorin join in conversation to discuss Eustache's magnum opus.
"I saw this movie for the first time in 1997, at Film Forum in New York. Maybe there’s even a cohort of us from those screenings . . . the quatre-vingt-dix-septards. I walked in with no sense of what I was in for. I left depleted, too sad to speak, certain this was the best movie I’d ever seen."
- Rachel Kushner, Harpers, 2022
The Mother and the Whore
After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May 1968 came The Mother and the Whore, the legendary, autobiographical film from Jean Eustache that captures, through the microcosm of a ménage à trois, a disillusioned generation navigating the 1970s. The aimless, clueless Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a dalliance with the younger, sexually liberated Veronika (Françoise Lebrun, Eustache’s own former lover), leading to a volatile open relationship marked by everyday emotional violence and subtle but catastrophic shifts in power dynamics. Transmitting his own sex life to the screen with a startling immediacy, Eustache achieves an intimacy so deep, it cuts.
Please note: seating is limited. Box Office opens thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime. Online ticket sales will be honored up until 15 minutes after the scheduled showtime. In-store ticket purchases are subject to availability, first-come, first-served. We do not operate a standby list.
