The Mother and the Whore

After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May ’68 came The Mother and the Whore, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache that captured a disillusioned generation navigating the 1970s post-idealism within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless, Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont). His dalliance with the younger, sexually liberated Veronika (Françoise Lebrun) leads to a volatile open relationship marked by everyday emotional violence and subtle but catastrophic shifts in power dynamics.