“The world will be saved by children, soldiers and madmen.” Jean-Pierre Leaud utters this quote in “The Mother and the Whore,” and I quote, in order to evoke a search for contextual origin.
It is unsure where to begin, which makes it difficult to understand where this is leading. That in turn is very French, which fits in well with this review centered upon two very French films that were shown this month at the Wexner Center’s presentation of French Classics.
A Clouzot film, “The Truth,” seems a fitting place to start. The film unfolds with Brigitte Bardot (“Contempt,” “And God Created Woman”) as the anti-hero Dominique, brash, irreverent, promiscuous and accused of murder, which contrasts in an interesting fashion with her typically being one of the most sexually desirable objects of the 1960s. While on trial, her existence is combed through in a flashback sequence and seems to contradict every tenet of conservative sensibility.
Throughout the film, those conservative proclivities seem to come to trial as a sort of social critique, the rigidity of moral platitudes guilty of being incapable of understanding circumstance and the confluence of exterior forces.
While Dominique cheats on her lover, scorns her sister and infuriates her parents, her irreverence and lack of control become her appeal; her conviction to absurd whimsy becomes her integrity. Clouzot’s Dominique is captivatingly complex. The cinematography was mostly straightforward, though one interesting sequence lingers in memory.
“The Mother and the Whore,” Jean Eustache’s best known work, seems an experimentation with tedium that teeters on the edge of maliciousness. For almost four hours Eustache develops and unravels a menage a trois using a bare minimum of external elements, momentum or interesting camera work. It seems reminiscent of Sartre’s “No Exit” twofold, in that its characters devour each other in a film better suited to theater, and the film itself at times is a nauseating confrontation with emptiness.
If one has the patience for suffering, Eustache comes through with some brilliant dialogue and clever self referential devices, typically delivered through Jean-Pierre Leaud (“The 400 Blows”), the golden child of the French New Wave.
While excruciatingly slow, it has the integrity to not care, and in its indifference to the conventional expectation of momentum, becomes oddly enigmatic.
