New Restoration! 50th Anniversary!

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 post-idealism 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless, Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Lafont), and begins a dalliance with the younger, sexually liberated Veronika (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.

“One of the great moviegoing experiences of my life… A fitting epitaph for the French New Wave, it’s one of those films that feels like it defines a generational turning point — when the idealism of the 1960s soured into the selfish libertinism of the ‘70s.” – Sean Burns, WBUR