La maman et la putain, Jean Eustache, 1973

Jean-Pierre Lèaud, La Maman Et La Putain, Jean Eustache, 1973

C'è chi inizia il film a un'ora decente, e poi ci sono io! @vpervaffanculo

Je suis dans une sorte de réflexion, où j'écoute le passé de ma mère, décédée. Elle m'a dit, peu avant sa mort 'là, il y a mes carnets'. Elle désignait un petit meuble en bois a tiroir, 'tu les liras hein', semblait-elle dire, surtout.

J'ai pas bien compris pourquoi elle voulait que je le sache, pourquoi c'était important. Je me disais qu'il y avait un truc sur moi.

Je ne voulais pas. Lire. Ses pensées.

Puis un jour j'ai lu. Il n'y avait pas grand-chose. Peu de pages écrites. Je me suis demandé si j'avais bien gardé ses carnets. Et depuis ce jour, je me demande... Jusqu'à tout à l'heure. Je faisais la cuisine. Les pensées ont dérivées vers ces souvenirs. Ses souvenirs. Ses carnets.

En même temps est passée une chanson que je pensais être tirée des valseuses, les paroles... Putain, l'étais porté ! Comme par ce qu'avait pu ressentir ma mère, qui me communiquait une terrible vérité en me confiant 'je ne voulais pas de ça pour ma fille, pas ça, non'.

[En fait c'est Diabologum]

Je me suis dit très étrange, comme connexion. Je me suis dit que j'aurais en fait dû être une fille. Qu'elle avait changé ça, m'avait d'une manière ou d'une autre transformé en garçon. Pour ne pas que je vive ce qu'elle avait ressenti, elle, à son époque ('femme libre", m'a dit mon père plus tard dans le vent).

J'aurais un psy, je lui confierais, que je me crois très différent de ce que je suis. Ca explique beaucoup de choses. Comme si ma mère avait tenu la main de sa fille sans lui dévoiler qu'elle n'aurait pas du être garçon, et qu'il allait falloir vivre avec.

Une femme peut-elle, dans son ventre, désigner son embryon et en changer le genre ? C'est tellement explicatif... Ca résonne avec tellement d'indices. Messages un peu cachés, voix des anges et des oiseaux qui attirent l'attention sur 'dis, tu dirais pas que ça, quand même c'est...' et de pointer sans doigt, sans mot, un petit truc...

J'ai entendu ma mère dire à sa mère "un jour tu m'as traitée de putain !" Ma mère était surement bien autre chose que ce ça mère ce jour là lui disait.

An Underrated Gem: Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore (1973), A Review of the Film and A Rant About the ''Man-child'' Trope in French Cinema

Blog Post #7

Youtube is a great place to watch old and long foreign films with subtitles, even if they are of the worst quality. In 2020, when we all had to stay at home, I was watching all the films I could find from La Nouvelle Vague, when all the films by Godard, Truffaut and Rohmer were finished, I came across a relatively unknown director whose name is Jean Eustache, best known for his film ''La Maman et la Putain''. The title of the film sounded wild to me, so I went for it, ignoring the quality and length. The film begins with a young man, Alexandre, who wakes up in a woman's bed and decides to declare his love to another woman. Alex is a dreamer, he likes to talk about politics, art and philosophy; he thinks he is a hopeless romantic and a naive man, maybe a bit lost in the modern world. But outwardly, Alex is an unemployed young man who is a burden to everyone he meets because he is open about his needs and is not ashamed to get a little 'help' from the women in his life. He lives with an older woman with whom he sometimes sleeps, and he is fine with the fact that this woman sometimes brings another man to have sex with, to the bed where Alexandre sleeps. Alex spends his life looking at girls on the streets of Paris or sitting in cafés chatting with his "enlightened" friend because he has nothing else to do. On the day he learns that his ex-lover, whom he wants to marry, is engaged, he meets Verinoka, an open-minded nurse, in a café. Alex is unfamiliar with Veronika's unconventional honesty, and she will shake the young man's views on sexuality and relationships.

Veronika and Alexandre, La Maman et La Putain

The film is about disappointed youth after the events of '68, about bohemian life, about people who try to be nihilistic, but when confronted with real emotions they mess everything up and seem "reckless". The director wrote long monologues for Alexandre's character. The two women and we listen to Alexandre's ideas over and over again. Alex is an egoist, someone who, thanks to his devil's feather, is able to get out of situations in which he is helpless. He has a blunt attitude to relationships and women, thinking he knows everything. Because of his relaxed attitude, women had to play the "cool, uncaring" girl in their relationships with him. Whenever Marie, the character he lives with at home, gets frustrated, she shuts up and looks at her own life because of Alex's nonchalance, but underneath there is an undercurrent of ugliness and defiance. In fact, the film shows that people who appear to be very open do not express their true feelings and thoughts just to keep their image intact. While the character of Veronika at the beginning of the film presents the image of an uncaring woman who sleeps with everyone, who is not afraid to tell Alexandre that she desires him, who expresses her sexual desires, we see that she does not reveal a side of herself.

Her "putain" side is a defence mechanism against the men around her, it is the easiest way for her to communicate with them and live her sexuality, but she expects love, honesty (not indiscretion under this bohemian guise) and understanding from a relationship. She even expresses that she wants to be a "maman". Although the director has chosen Alex as the childish protagonist, the character he really wants to draw our attention to is Veronika. He shows the overwhelming difference between the emotional and social capacities of young men and women, and how the term "sexual freedom" affects women and men differently and what this term means to them. It also shows how most men don't know shit about a woman's psyche, which has been given so many rights in a society that is still not sure how to adapt to the new order. The confusion caused by this "excessive" freedom and the state of women in the modern world, torn between being a "woman of the house", a "mother of their children" and having a career and being able to live their sexuality freely, is portrayed through the character of Veronika. At a time when women are so confused and overwhelmed by this dilemma, men like Alex, who is literally a man-child (which can be seen in almost every film of Godard's early career and in Rohmer's Six Moral Tales and Tales of Seasons), become the most insufferable character of all. Eustache doesn't "punish" or "change" his character Alex because of the women in his presence, but Rohmer and Godard certainly do.

I think Rohmer's whole career is about human interactions and relationships, he's one of the most successful directors when it comes to portraying women in the modern world and male characters who don't understand a thing about the psyche of the women around them, but pretend to be the expert on relationships and how to deal with a woman. Rohmer's films become satires on this man-child who thinks he knows everything about women, sex and life, meets a woman or several women, tries to manipulate his way out of every situation he encounters, and Rohmer destroys this man's ego throughout the film. His most famous films, Love in the Afternoon (1972), My Night at Maud's (1967), Claire's Knee (1970), La Collectionneuse (1967), are about a man who has very strong opinions about how a woman should look and behave, who starts to lust after the woman he seems to hate and criticise. In La Collectionneuse, the main character, Adrien, was forced to live in a villa with a woman, Haidee, who was a friend of a friend of his. He had a very low opinion of her because she had many sexual partners and was very open about it. At the end of the film, he was desperate to sleep with her, to "show her" that he was the best in bed among all the other men, but later the girl was indifferent to him and he was humiliated.

Adrien and Haidee, La Collectionneuse

For Godard, the most important of his films to have a male child protagonist is Masculin-Feminin - the main character, Paul the, is so preoccupied with himself and his surveys that he doesn't notice his girlfriend is having a lesbian affair. At the end of the film, Godard punishes his ''ignorance'' by having the girls push him out of a window.

Paul, Masculin Feminin

Although these man-child characters are at times insufferable, they are such fun to watch, and their ego's are silenced in the New Wave movies. It is a great trope to deal with the issue of modernity and so-called sexual freedom, which is still not so free for women, and the clash between the social-emotional capacity of a male and the modern woman's.

La maman et la putain, Jean Eustache, 1973

list of men in dick roles but i still wanna you know:

1. john cassavetes in mikey and nicky and husbands (god no ion want rosemary baby john even tho he is so...)

2. jean pierre leaud in la maman et la putain

3. tony leung in lust, caution

La maman et la putain (dir. Jean Eustache 1973)

La maman et la putain (1973) dir. Jean Eustache

Diabologum - La Maman et la Putain

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