Reader, K.

English

Enlighten: Publications

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Reader, K. (1997) The mother the whore & the dandy. Sight and Sound, 7 
(10). pp. 28-30. ISSN 0037-4806 
 
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/8904/ 
 
Deposited on: 7 December 2009 
 
 
Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow 
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk 
AIIIII. tilled: EBstacIIe. 
rigIIt, IIirlIctIa ill 
die aprbBIRtsIIand 
~ 1Ia...... (JeaR Piene 
LiaIII)"1is IiwHIIlm!r 
Marie (IenalIIttllafBt); 
iIltlle l.iaId. 
lafBt..F leIanm 
asfinllib,a .. 
tnis ....... far Ji&Itt 
With i'ts sex 
talk and 
mockingof 
Sanre, the 
re-released 
'La Mamanet 
la putain' is 
aprescient 
post-'68 
slacker epic. 
By Keith 
Reader 
_ Try to imagine a film set in early 70s Paris 
• which definitively distils the emotional 
changes wrought by the May 1968 events, while 
making only passing reference to them. Or an 
amalgam of the cinema of Eric Rohmer and John 
Cassavetes whose central male character makes 
Woody Allen appear the epitome oflaconic altru­
ism. These evocations and more apply to Jean 
Eustache's La Maman et la putain (1973), now to be 
re-released after long being unavailable. The film 
- loosely, a love triangle set in and around Saint­
Germain-<les-Pres - is shot in black and white and 
lasts for three hours and 40 minutes, which 
might be expected to work against it in the era of 
omnipresent colour and the video clip. Yet of all 
the films I have taught, it remains the only one 
where I have come upon passionate students 
arguing about it exactly as though they were dis­
cussing real people - and this, I suspect, because 
rather than in spite of the extreme stylisation 
and hyperreality of the dialogue, which on first 
viewing may seem improvised but which was 
actually most meticulously scripted. 
At first sight La Maman et la putain fits into 
a type of film of which French cinema is notori­
28110 SIGHT AND SOUND 
ously productive: the highly verbalised introspec­
tion and self-analysis of the over- or (depending 
on one's point of view) the insufficiently culti­
vated. One of the first sightings of this introspec­
tion was Jean-Pierre Melville's cameo role as the 
novelist Parvulesco interviewed byJean Seberg in 
Godard's A bout de souffle (1959). Rohmer's count­
less nave-gazers are probably the best known, 
while the work of Richard Linklater or Whit Still­
man indicates the influence of this tendency on 
American indie cinema. The cultural upheaval of 
May '68, a time characterised by fulsome and 
often highly public analysis of self and society, 
certainly favoured this kind of film-making. At 
a time when the "right to speak" was paramount, 
when people crowded into the occupied Sor­
bonne or Odeon theatre not only to overthrow 
the capitalist order but also to express their deep­
est feelings, and even to recount their dreams, 
verbal and emotional self-indulgence came to be 
perceived almost as a duty. 
Tragic aftermath 
It is easy to forget how sombre the aftermath of 
May was for many participants. The movement's 
political failure, following so rapidly on the dizzy 
expectations raised, manifested itself in a record 
number of nervous breakdowns and suicides, as 
well as in a steady trek to the (generally Lacanian) 
psychoanalyst's couch. It is this downside to the 
"right to speak", the truly tragic element of 
May's release of energies, that Eustache's film so 
remarkably figures. The director's suicide in 
1981, following on partial paralysis in a fall and 
significant professional and alcohol problems, 
certainly worked to reinforce this perception 
- but I had seen the film at least three times 
before then, and its tragic dimension had been 
clearly apparent to me. It is this dimension that 
is lacking in the recent Ma vie sexuelle (Paul Dedalus' 
Journey), and for me contributes to its irritatingly 
posturing character (though set a quarter cen­
tury and more after 1968, Arnaud Desplechin's 
film nonetheless features central characters who 
graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure 
and are on the staff at Nanterre University, twin 
epicentres of the May movement). 
In Cinematographe in May 1982, Didier Gold­
schmidt describes Le Maman et la putain as "bear­
ing witness to the post-'68 period, bursting with 
the slogans and private jokes of its time." The 
May movement's truly revolutionary impetus is 
generally considered to have died when a secu­
rity guard at the Renault factory shot Maoist mil­
itant Pierre Overney in 1972, so the film's date 
(1973) places it firmly as a film of post-May disil­
lusionment. The sneers at Sartre uttered by 
Alexandre Uean-Pierre Leaud) and his friends 
clearly suggest this; so, more interestingly, do 
Alexandre'S remarks to his former partner 
Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten) towards the begin­
ning of the film: "After crises you have to forget 
everything quickly, rub everything out. Like 
France after the Occupation, like France after 
May '68. You are getting back on your feet like 
France after '68, my love. Do you remember? We 
said that we'd had a narrow escape, we'd been 
lucky to have a childhood and we weren't sure 
that our children would have one in this new 
world where 17-year-olds are old men." 
Taken in conjunction with a question Alex­
andre asks Gilberte - "How long does the aver­
age couple last? Five years? Seven years?" - this 
strongly suggests that the couple had met, as 
so many others did, during the May events. When 
the film begins - and when it ends - Alexandre 
is living with the somewhat older Marie 
(Bernadette Lafont), who owns a dress-shop and 
subsidises his feckless cafe-haunting existence, 
though by the film's close it is difficult to say for 
how much longer the two will live together. On 
his side at least, their relationship is a compara­
tively open one, and there is a distinct echo of 
Sartre and de Beauvoir in the fact that through­
out the couple address each other with the for­
mal 'vous'. The crisis in their being a couple 
comes about when Alexandre picks up (in 1973 
still a comparatively respectable if not actually 
compulsory activity) a raucously promiscuous 
nurse of Polish origins, Veronika (Fran~oise 
Lebrun); but this has probably been triggered 
by his unavailing attempt, in the film's open­
ing sequence, to renew his relationship with 
Gilberte. This uneasy trio, a menage-a-trois manque 
(with Marie and Veronika as maman!mother and 
putain!whore respectively), dominates the action 
of the film, which ends with the probably preg­
nant and certainly drunk Veronika vomiting. 
To the best of my knowledge nobody has ever 
vomited in a Rohmer film, and the insistently 
grainy physicality ofLa Maman et la putain, its mise 
en scene of its characters' bodies in particular, is 
what reminds me of Cassavetes, who is once 
again fashionable, especially in France. As so 
often in Cassavetes, the sexual here is anything 
but erotic. The central sexual triangle is clearly 
about power, hilariously so in the scene where 
the two women kiss and cuddle while Veronika 
compares Alexandre's organ to the spout of 
a teapot. Alexandre in an earlier conversation has 
referred to the MLF (Women's Liberation Move­
ment) as "women who are fed up with bringing 
their husbands breakfast in bed," exhibiting 
a distaste that Veronika, who has never even 
heard the initials, finds bizarre. In all manner of 
ways the film seems to me to distil the sexual dis­
array that characterised the aftermath of 1968, 
bookended as it is by the abortion Gilberte has 
had before it starts - an operation still illegal in 
the France of the time - and byVeronika's proba­
ble pregnancy and Alexandre's evident incapac­
ity to cope with it, or anything else very much. 
Its sexual politics were not the only thing that 
led to the film's being much criticised in France 
for its supposedly reactionary attitudes on its ~ 
SIGHT AND SOUND ZlIIO 
~ release. Alexandre's unnamed friend Uacques 
Renard) flaunts extreme right-wing sympathies, 
as evidenced by his book on the 55 and by the fact 
that Alexandre knocks at his door to the rhythm 
of the slogan "AI-ge-rie fran~ai-se". This dandyistic 
posturing comes through also in the sneering at 
5artre. It should be remembered that the far 
right as well as the far left came to the fore in the 
years after 1968. 
To allude to a phenomenon is not to endorse 
it, however, and what Eustache's film gives us, 
notably towards the end, in one of Alexandre's 
many monologues, is a kind of documentary 
montage ofdifferent Mayor post-May discourses: 
that is, different ways of dealing with the mas­
sive institutional, political and above all cultural 
crisis May represented. Alexandre starts by pre­
dicting that ifordinary people in the street begin 
to "freak out", interesting things are likely to 
happen (the surrealist side of the May move­
ment), goes on to recount a hallucination that 
the motorway had become "something like the 
trace of an ancient civilisation" (ecology all but 
avant la lettre) and winds up with an ironic refer­
ence to "the least well-off social classes", a phrase 
derived from the programme of the electoral left 
defeated at the polls that very year. Once the rev­
olutionary impulse of 1968 had run its course, 
the forces it unleashed found their way, pre­
cisely, into the spheres of personal interaction 
(from "freaking out" to psychoanalysis), environ­
mental concern, and the electoral politics repre­
sented above all by the Mitterrand years. In this 
and other ways, Eustache's film seems remark­
ably prescient. 
Emotional dependence 
La Maman et la putain also gives Jean-Pierre Leaud 
the role of his career - a career almost compara­
ble to that of Orson Welles for extraordinary pre­
cocity and subsequent bitter disappointment. 
Leaud's first role as Antoine Doinel, Truffaut's 
alter ego in Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), remains 
one of cinema's great portrayals of early adoles­
cence; it also imprisoned the young actor in 
a part he was to reprise a further four times over 
a 19-year period, and seemingly in an engulfing 
emotional dependence upon Truffaut, whose 
tragically early death in 1984 intensified Leaud's 
already marked depressive tendencies. He has 
played few lead roles since then. 
So Leaud's performance as Alexandre in La 
Maman et la putain - remarkable for its sheer ver­
bal indefatigability and its combination of emo­
tional vulnerability and insensitivity - currently 
stands as the apotheosis of a blighted career. His 
incessant monologuing and chronic indecisive­
ness - familiar from generations of Rohmer 
heroes, but also perhaps from Jean-Paul Bel­
mondo in Godard's Pierrot Ie fou (1965) - acquire 
monstrously symptomatic dimensions, from the 
manic twitchiness of the Leaud screen persona to 
the hyperreal length of the film itself, paradoxi­
cally but accurately described by Goldschmidt as 
"an extract from a much longer film relating ten 
to 15 years of life". The constant use of fades 
between sequences contributes to this effect, as 
does the difficulty oflmowing over how long the 
action takes place - a difficulty reinforced by the 
characters' unending sameness-in-difference, the 
manner in which Alexandre's monologues in 
Dandy in siple: 
Jesn-Plem Liaud etns 
his finest perfurllllllClln 
tbe SIIf-oIIsess8d IIIxllldr1. 
spinning lIIIlIIesstallllll 
tbe post·'"calis of the 
LlftBsnll 
particular loop round upon themselves Moebius­
fashion. If these monologues have a tragic dimen­
sion which offsets their undeniably irksome 
self-indulgence, that tragedy, as the film's title 
suggests, is probably the oldest one in town - an 
Oedipal drama with Marie as the primary mater­
nal focus (and variants of the same drama were 
playing on analysts' couches all over the Left 
Bank at the time the film was made). "To speak 
only with the words of others, that's what 
I should like. That must be freedom": Alexandre's 
words, in a monologue addressed (as it happens) 
to Veronika, echo notions of discourse and inter­
textuality which La Maman et la putain puts into 
play and interrogates quite as searchingly as any­
thing in later-period Godard. 
I speak of Marie as "the primary maternal 
focus" because fundamental to the emotional 
dynamics of the film is its redistribution of roles 
between her and Veronika as it nears its close. 
Marie's subsidising of Alexandre's infidelities, 
and her explicit permission for him to use their 
shared flat as a 'bachelor pad' while she is on 
a business trip to London, can be seen as placing 
her in the world of paying for 'services rendered' 
whose logical culmination is the sex industry. 
Veronika's possible pregnancy places her as the 
'mother' at the film's close - though this has 
been suggested for some time by her increasingly 
charged attitude, at once loving and chiding, 
towards Alexandre. In the penultimate sequence, 
she delivers a monologue whose force puts it 
for me among the greatest of all cinematic 
moments, and which at one point expresses 
impeccably Catholic sentiments on sex and pro­
creation: "If only people could see once and for 
all that screwing is shit. That there is only one 
really beautiful thing - screwing because you 
love each other so much that you want to make 
a child that is like us and that otherwise it's 
just sordid... You must only screw if you're 
really in love." 
Unsurprisingly this attracted much criticism, 
but it seems to me that it quite literally 
calls out to be read in context. That context 
includes Wronika's Polish (and thus undoubt­
edly Catholic) origins and upbringing (we learn 
she was a virgin until she was 20) as well as the 
beginnings of a reaction against the 60s 'sexual 
revolution' which was to issue in the widespread 
embracing of feminist ideas and for many in 
France in a return to varieties of Catholicism. In 
a more specific textual sense, this film's mono­
logues can be said to be what Bakhtinians would 
call 'carnivalesque': and thus despite appear­
ances, precisely not speaking with one voice. 
Alexandre's ambition to "speak only with the 
words of others", exemplified in his montage of 
post-May discourses, clearly recognises this. 
Veronika's final monologue juxtaposes a naive 
Catholicism with, among other things, simulta­
neous affirmation and denial of the importance 
of sex ("Your sex Alexandre which gives me such 
delight, your sex Alexandre is quite unimportant 
to me"); a desire to return to a pre-sexual condi­
tion of unity with mother and father ("I could 
stay with you all the time, I'm so happy - I feel 
loved by both of you");· and a refusal of the very 
vocabulary of sexual condemnation ("There are 
no whores on this earth, shit, understand that"). 
Unlike Alexandre in his dandyistic deploy­
ment of the oxymoronic, Veronika - closer in this 
to what such theorists as Helene Cixous were to 
term "feminine writing" - regurgitates her con­
tradictions pell-mell, like an analysand neither 
caring nor seeking to resolve or reconcile them. 
In this respect her monologue is like an echo 
of Emmanuelle Riva's in Resnais and Duras' 
Hiroshima man amour 14 years before, and the 
vomiting with which the film ends is the mono­
logue's prolongation as much as its interruption. 
Bringing it all back 
A5 the generation of1968, now twice as old as the 
film, segues smoothly from one mid-life crisis to 
the next, this seems as good a time as any to 
revive La Maman et la putain. For many in France, 
indeed, it has never gone away - and such 
apparently inconsequential lines as Alexandre's 
"Nobody these days says: 'I drank an excellent 
lemonade at lunch today'" function as talismanic 
catchwords among the film's aficionados. Well 
before I learnt of its impending re-release, I was 
in a Paris cinema watching Lucas Belvaux's 
Pour Rire! (1996): in it Leaud's character has to 
go to hospital at one point, and while waiting 
sees a nurse, probably in her late forties, go past. 
He asks her if they have not met before. She 
turns, replies "No, certainly not," and walks 
away and out of the film. Intertextuallightning 
struck as I recognised Fran<;oise Lebrun, and 
from the reaction around me I was not the only 
keeper of the flame in the cinema. May there 
soon be many more. 
All translations from the French are Keith Reader's 
own. 'La Maman et la putain' opens on 17 October 
38110 SIGHT AND SOUND .~ 


The mother the whore &#38; the dandy

Enlighten

       Reader, K. (1997) The mother the whore & the dandy. Sight and Sound, 7 (10). pp. 28-30. ISSN 0037-4806  http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/8904/  Deposited on: 7 December 2009   Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk AIIIII. tilled: EBstacIIe. rigIIt, IIirlIctIa ill die aprbBIRtsIIand ~ 1Ia...... (JeaR Piene LiaIII)"1is IiwHIIlm!r Marie (IenalIIttllafBt); iIltlle l.iaId. lafBt..F leIanm asfinllib,a .. tnis ....... far Ji&Itt With i'ts sex talk and mockingof Sanre, the re-released 'La Mamanet la putain' is aprescient post-'68 slacker epic. By Keith Reader _ Try to imagine a film set in early 70s Paris • which definitively distils the emotional changes wrought by the May 1968 events, while making only passing reference to them. Or an amalgam of the cinema of Eric Rohmer and John Cassavetes whose central male character makes Woody Allen appear the epitome oflaconic altru­ism. These evocations and more apply to Jean Eustache's La Maman et la putain (1973), now to be re-released after long being unavailable. The film - loosely, a love triangle set in and around Saint­Germain-<les-Pres - is shot in black and white and lasts for three hours and 40 minutes, which might be expected to work against it in the era of omnipresent colour and the video clip. Yet of all the films I have taught, it remains the only one where I have come upon passionate students arguing about it exactly as though they were dis­cussing real people - and this, I suspect, because rather than in spite of the extreme stylisation and hyperreality of the dialogue, which on first viewing may seem improvised but which was actually most meticulously scripted. At first sight La Maman et la putain fits into a type of film of which French cinema is notori­28110 SIGHT AND SOUND ously productive: the highly verbalised introspec­tion and self-analysis of the over- or (depending on one's point of view) the insufficiently culti­vated. One of the first sightings of this introspec­tion was Jean-Pierre Melville's cameo role as the novelist Parvulesco interviewed byJean Seberg in Godard's A bout de souffle (1959). Rohmer's count­less nave-gazers are probably the best known, while the work of Richard Linklater or Whit Still­man indicates the influence of this tendency on American indie cinema. The cultural upheaval of May '68, a time characterised by fulsome and often highly public analysis of self and society, certainly favoured this kind of film-making. At a time when the "right to speak" was paramount, when people crowded into the occupied Sor­bonne or Odeon theatre not only to overthrow the capitalist order but also to express their deep­est feelings, and even to recount their dreams, verbal and emotional self-indulgence came to be perceived almost as a duty. Tragic aftermath It is easy to forget how sombre the aftermath of May was for many participants. The movement's political failure, following so rapidly on the dizzy expectations raised, manifested itself in a record number of nervous breakdowns and suicides, as well as in a steady trek to the (generally Lacanian) psychoanalyst's couch. It is this downside to the "right to speak", the truly tragic element of May's release of energies, that Eustache's film so remarkably figures. The director's suicide in 1981, following on partial paralysis in a fall and significant professional and alcohol problems, certainly worked to reinforce this perception - but I had seen the film at least three times before then, and its tragic dimension had been clearly apparent to me. It is this dimension that is lacking in the recent Ma vie sexuelle (Paul Dedalus' Journey), and for me contributes to its irritatingly posturing character (though set a quarter cen­tury and more after 1968, Arnaud Desplechin's film nonetheless features central characters who graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure and are on the staff at Nanterre University, twin epicentres of the May movement). In Cinematographe in May 1982, Didier Gold­schmidt describes Le Maman et la putain as "bear­ing witness to the post-'68 period, bursting with the slogans and private jokes of its time." The May movement's truly revolutionary impetus is generally considered to have died when a secu­rity guard at the Renault factory shot Maoist mil­itant Pierre Overney in 1972, so the film's date (1973) places it firmly as a film of post-May disil­lusionment. The sneers at Sartre uttered by Alexandre Uean-Pierre Leaud) and his friends clearly suggest this; so, more interestingly, do Alexandre'S remarks to his former partner Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten) towards the begin­ning of the film: "After crises you have to forget everything quickly, rub everything out. Like France after the Occupation, like France after May '68. You are getting back on your feet like France after '68, my love. Do you remember? We said that we'd had a narrow escape, we'd been lucky to have a childhood and we weren't sure that our children would have one in this new world where 17-year-olds are old men." Taken in conjunction with a question Alex­andre asks Gilberte - "How long does the aver­age couple last? Five years? Seven years?" - this strongly suggests that the couple had met, as so many others did, during the May events. When the film begins - and when it ends - Alexandre is living with the somewhat older Marie (Bernadette Lafont), who owns a dress-shop and subsidises his feckless cafe-haunting existence, though by the film's close it is difficult to say for how much longer the two will live together. On his side at least, their relationship is a compara­tively open one, and there is a distinct echo of Sartre and de Beauvoir in the fact that through­out the couple address each other with the for­mal 'vous'. The crisis in their being a couple comes about when Alexandre picks up (in 1973 still a comparatively respectable if not actually compulsory activity) a raucously promiscuous nurse of Polish origins, Veronika (Fran~oise Lebrun); but this has probably been triggered by his unavailing attempt, in the film's open­ing sequence, to renew his relationship with Gilberte. This uneasy trio, a menage-a-trois manque (with Marie and Veronika as maman!mother and putain!whore respectively), dominates the action of the film, which ends with the probably preg­nant and certainly drunk Veronika vomiting. To the best of my knowledge nobody has ever vomited in a Rohmer film, and the insistently grainy physicality ofLa Maman et la putain, its mise en scene of its characters' bodies in particular, is what reminds me of Cassavetes, who is once again fashionable, especially in France. As so often in Cassavetes, the sexual here is anything but erotic. The central sexual triangle is clearly about power, hilariously so in the scene where the two women kiss and cuddle while Veronika compares Alexandre's organ to the spout of a teapot. Alexandre in an earlier conversation has referred to the MLF (Women's Liberation Move­ment) as "women who are fed up with bringing their husbands breakfast in bed," exhibiting a distaste that Veronika, who has never even heard the initials, finds bizarre. In all manner of ways the film seems to me to distil the sexual dis­array that characterised the aftermath of 1968, bookended as it is by the abortion Gilberte has had before it starts - an operation still illegal in the France of the time - and byVeronika's proba­ble pregnancy and Alexandre's evident incapac­ity to cope with it, or anything else very much. Its sexual politics were not the only thing that led to the film's being much criticised in France for its supposedly reactionary attitudes on its ~ SIGHT AND SOUND ZlIIO ~ release. Alexandre's unnamed friend Uacques Renard) flaunts extreme right-wing sympathies, as evidenced by his book on the 55 and by the fact that Alexandre knocks at his door to the rhythm of the slogan "AI-ge-rie fran~ai-se". This dandyistic posturing comes through also in the sneering at 5artre. It should be remembered that the far right as well as the far left came to the fore in the years after 1968. To allude to a phenomenon is not to endorse it, however, and what Eustache's film gives us, notably towards the end, in one of Alexandre's many monologues, is a kind of documentary montage ofdifferent Mayor post-May discourses: that is, different ways of dealing with the mas­sive institutional, political and above all cultural crisis May represented. Alexandre starts by pre­dicting that ifordinary people in the street begin to "freak out", interesting things are likely to happen (the surrealist side of the May move­ment), goes on to recount a hallucination that the motorway had become "something like the trace of an ancient civilisation" (ecology all but avant la lettre) and winds up with an ironic refer­ence to "the least well-off social classes", a phrase derived from the programme of the electoral left defeated at the polls that very year. Once the rev­olutionary impulse of 1968 had run its course, the forces it unleashed found their way, pre­cisely, into the spheres of personal interaction (from "freaking out" to psychoanalysis), environ­mental concern, and the electoral politics repre­sented above all by the Mitterrand years. In this and other ways, Eustache's film seems remark­ably prescient. Emotional dependence La Maman et la putain also gives Jean-Pierre Leaud the role of his career - a career almost compara­ble to that of Orson Welles for extraordinary pre­cocity and subsequent bitter disappointment. Leaud's first role as Antoine Doinel, Truffaut's alter ego in Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), remains one of cinema's great portrayals of early adoles­cence; it also imprisoned the young actor in a part he was to reprise a further four times over a 19-year period, and seemingly in an engulfing emotional dependence upon Truffaut, whose tragically early death in 1984 intensified Leaud's already marked depressive tendencies. He has played few lead roles since then. So Leaud's performance as Alexandre in La Maman et la putain - remarkable for its sheer ver­bal indefatigability and its combination of emo­tional vulnerability and insensitivity - currently stands as the apotheosis of a blighted career. His incessant monologuing and chronic indecisive­ness - familiar from generations of Rohmer heroes, but also perhaps from Jean-Paul Bel­mondo in Godard's Pierrot Ie fou (1965) - acquire monstrously symptomatic dimensions, from the manic twitchiness of the Leaud screen persona to the hyperreal length of the film itself, paradoxi­cally but accurately described by Goldschmidt as "an extract from a much longer film relating ten to 15 years of life". The constant use of fades between sequences contributes to this effect, as does the difficulty oflmowing over how long the action takes place - a difficulty reinforced by the characters' unending sameness-in-difference, the manner in which Alexandre's monologues in Dandy in siple: Jesn-Plem Liaud etns his finest perfurllllllClln tbe SIIf-oIIsess8d IIIxllldr1. spinning lIIIlIIesstallllll tbe post·'"calis of the LlftBsnll particular loop round upon themselves Moebius­fashion. If these monologues have a tragic dimen­sion which offsets their undeniably irksome self-indulgence, that tragedy, as the film's title suggests, is probably the oldest one in town - an Oedipal drama with Marie as the primary mater­nal focus (and variants of the same drama were playing on analysts' couches all over the Left Bank at the time the film was made). "To speak only with the words of others, that's what I should like. That must be freedom": Alexandre's words, in a monologue addressed (as it happens) to Veronika, echo notions of discourse and inter­textuality which La Maman et la putain puts into play and interrogates quite as searchingly as any­thing in later-period Godard. I speak of Marie as "the primary maternal focus" because fundamental to the emotional dynamics of the film is its redistribution of roles between her and Veronika as it nears its close. Marie's subsidising of Alexandre's infidelities, and her explicit permission for him to use their shared flat as a 'bachelor pad' while she is on a business trip to London, can be seen as placing her in the world of paying for 'services rendered' whose logical culmination is the sex industry. Veronika's possible pregnancy places her as the 'mother' at the film's close - though this has been suggested for some time by her increasingly charged attitude, at once loving and chiding, towards Alexandre. In the penultimate sequence, she delivers a monologue whose force puts it for me among the greatest of all cinematic moments, and which at one point expresses impeccably Catholic sentiments on sex and pro­creation: "If only people could see once and for all that screwing is shit. That there is only one really beautiful thing - screwing because you love each other so much that you want to make a child that is like us and that otherwise it's just sordid... You must only screw if you're really in love." Unsurprisingly this attracted much criticism, but it seems to me that it quite literally calls out to be read in context. That context includes Wronika's Polish (and thus undoubt­edly Catholic) origins and upbringing (we learn she was a virgin until she was 20) as well as the beginnings of a reaction against the 60s 'sexual revolution' which was to issue in the widespread embracing of feminist ideas and for many in France in a return to varieties of Catholicism. In a more specific textual sense, this film's mono­logues can be said to be what Bakhtinians would call 'carnivalesque': and thus despite appear­ances, precisely not speaking with one voice. Alexandre's ambition to "speak only with the words of others", exemplified in his montage of post-May discourses, clearly recognises this. Veronika's final monologue juxtaposes a naive Catholicism with, among other things, simulta­neous affirmation and denial of the importance of sex ("Your sex Alexandre which gives me such delight, your sex Alexandre is quite unimportant to me"); a desire to return to a pre-sexual condi­tion of unity with mother and father ("I could stay with you all the time, I'm so happy - I feel loved by both of you");· and a refusal of the very vocabulary of sexual condemnation ("There are no whores on this earth, shit, understand that"). Unlike Alexandre in his dandyistic deploy­ment of the oxymoronic, Veronika - closer in this to what such theorists as Helene Cixous were to term "feminine writing" - regurgitates her con­tradictions pell-mell, like an analysand neither caring nor seeking to resolve or reconcile them. In this respect her monologue is like an echo of Emmanuelle Riva's in Resnais and Duras' Hiroshima man amour 14 years before, and the vomiting with which the film ends is the mono­logue's prolongation as much as its interruption. Bringing it all back A5 the generation of1968, now twice as old as the film, segues smoothly from one mid-life crisis to the next, this seems as good a time as any to revive La Maman et la putain. For many in France, indeed, it has never gone away - and such apparently inconsequential lines as Alexandre's "Nobody these days says: 'I drank an excellent lemonade at lunch today'" function as talismanic catchwords among the film's aficionados. Well before I learnt of its impending re-release, I was in a Paris cinema watching Lucas Belvaux's Pour Rire! (1996): in it Leaud's character has to go to hospital at one point, and while waiting sees a nurse, probably in her late forties, go past. He asks her if they have not met before. She turns, replies "No, certainly not," and walks away and out of the film. Intertextuallightning struck as I recognised Fran<;oise Lebrun, and from the reaction around me I was not the only keeper of the flame in the cinema. May there soon be many more. All translations from the French are Keith Reader's own. 'La Maman et la putain' opens on 17 October 38110 SIGHT AND SOUND .~ 

The mother the whore & the dandy

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The mother the whore &#38; the dandy

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