General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Mother and the Whore

The Mother and the Whore (French: La Maman et la putain) is a 1973 French black-and-white drama written and directed by Jean Eustache, following a young Parisian man, Alexandre, who lives with his girlfriend Marie while beginning an affair with a nurse, Veronika. At roughly three and a half hours of largely conversational material, it is one of the longest and most discussed French films of its era, and it won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Jean Eustache, who also co-edited the film with Denise de Casabianca¹
Principal cast	Jean-Pierre Léaud (Alexandre), Bernadette Lafont (Marie), Françoise Lebrun (Véronika), Isabelle Weingarten (Gilberte)¹
Runtime	Sources give 215, 217, 219, and 220 minutes for different prints and restorations³^•⁴
Cannes 1973	Grand Prix Spécial du Jury; Prix de la Critique Internationale, F.I.P.R.E.S.C.I. (ex-aequo); in competition for the Palme d'Or²^•⁵
Production	Shot in Paris in seven weeks across June and July 1972; budget about 700,000 francs⁶^•¹
Restoration	Restored and remastered in 4K in 2022 by Les Films du Losange, with support from the CNC, Cinémathèque suisse, and Chanel⁵
Critical standing	94% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (36 reviews); Metascore 89 on Metacritic; ranked in the BFI Sight and Sound critics' polls of 2002, 2012, and 2022⁷^•⁸^•⁹

Spoilers

Plot and form

Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is an idle young man who lives with Marie (Bernadette Lafont), who owns a small dress shop and supports him financially. He meets Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), a nurse, in a café, and begins an affair with her without leaving Marie, drawing the three into a turbulent ménage à trois.⁴^•¹⁰ The action unfolds in Parisian cafés, apartments, and streets between Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Prés.⁶

The film's method is talk. Eustache described his own bias: "everything is told and nothing is shown."¹¹ The critic Lucy Sante, writing for the Criterion Collection, describes it as a triangle picture in the lineage of Casablanca and Jules and Jim, but with only a handful of characters and shot in real-world locations, its primary subject being the changing status of women and gender relations. Two-thirds of the way through, the film replaces its male protagonist with Veronika as the central figure, the result of what Sante calls a competition of soliloquies.¹¹ Eustache himself wrote that the film's subject is "the way in which important actions are inserted" among incidental ones, and that a plot summary would give no idea of the film's ambitions.²

Production

Eustache wrote the script intending to finish in a week; he reported that at the end of that week he had not completed the opening scene. The film grew from monologues written daily, which accumulated into a draft of five to six hours. Its working title was Du Pain et des Rolls (Bread & Rolls).⁶

Funding and scale. Eustache had received good reviews for his earlier films but could not raise money for a feature; his producer friend Pierre Cottrell obtained financing from Bob Rafelson after the success of Easy Rider.¹¹ The budget was barely 700,000 francs, which the Larousse encyclopedia computes at a little over 3,000 francs per minute. Eustache controlled the film end to end: he wrote it, supervised the production, personally handled sound recording, appeared in a small role, and co-edited it.¹ His assistant Luc Béraud recalled a crew of only eleven people, and quoted Eustache's maxim that "there are cameras for looking and cameras for listening," with Eustache preferring to listen and placing the camera facing whoever spoke.¹²

The length was itself a product of policy. Until late 1972, a French release tax proportional to a film's length discouraged long films; its abolition made The Mother and the Whore possible. Eustache wrote that four hours was the bare minimum for the material and that each cut down to three and a half hours caused him pain.⁶

Reception and legacy

At Cannes in May 1973 the screening provoked a scandal; the jury, led by Ingrid Bergman, was reportedly offended by the film's crude dialogue and static, talk-heavy direction, yet it awarded the film the Grand Prix.³^•⁶ The film also divided audiences over its frank treatment of sexuality and abortion, a contentious political topic in France at the time.⁶

Critics have read the film as a document of the period after May 1968. Richard Brody of The New Yorker called it a comprehensive vision of France's post-1968 moment, and Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader called it a historical marker, both for the end of the French New Wave and for the aftermath of the failed May 1968 revolt.⁷^•⁸ The film placed in the BFI Sight and Sound critics' polls at number 29 in 2002, number 46 in 2012, and number 53 in 2022.⁹ Its admirers among filmmakers named in the 2022 restoration press kit include Wim Wenders, Michael Haneke, Jane Campion, Claire Denis, Jim Jarmusch, John Waters, and Guillermo del Toro.⁶

Availability. For decades the film was difficult to see; it had never been restored, and Eustache's heir Boris Eustache spent years in litigation over the rights and declined DVD deals he considered exploitative, leaving the director's work largely unavailable.¹³^•¹⁴ The 4K restoration by Les Films du Losange opened the Cannes Classics selection in 2022, nearly fifty years after the premiere, and the film returned to French cinemas that June; the restored version includes a scene cut for a 1982 re-release.¹³^•⁶ In North America it reached home video in 2025 through the Criterion Collection in a 4K UHD edition.¹⁵

Context in Eustache's career

The Mother and the Whore was Eustache's first feature and one of only two he completed before his death by suicide in Paris in 1981 at the age of 42.¹¹^•¹⁶ He considered it the only one of his films he was able to hate, because it kept confronting him with his present self, while the past in his other films protected him.⁶ The film drew closely on his own love life: Françoise Lebrun was his former lover, and the story formed within a few streets of his Montparnasse neighborhood.⁵^•⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026