The Mother and the Whore

Jean Eustache made La Maman et la Putain for very little money in 1972, shot it in the flats of people he knew, and took the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1973 to booing from part of the audience. It runs 219 minutes, consists almost entirely of talk, and is routinely named the essential French film of the decade after the New Wave collapsed.

Jean-Pierre Léaud plays Alexandre, unemployed and unembarrassed, living off Marie — Bernadette Lafont — while conducting an affair with Veronika, a nurse played by Françoise Lebrun in her first role. The dialogue was written in full and delivered verbatim, much of it drawn from Eustache's own relationships, and the effect is of eavesdropping on people performing candour at each other for hours.

Eustache killed himself in 1981 and the film spent decades effectively unavailable; the 2022 restoration returned it to cinemas and to a new audience, where it now sits at 4.15 on Letterboxd. It is a demanding watch and an unusually exact one: the record of a generation discovering that sexual liberation had not made anybody kinder. Léaud, who was Truffaut's Antoine Doinel, has never been used more mercilessly.