Almost a month ago to the day, Cannes Classics, the heritage selection of the 75th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, opened with a bang and restored its letters of nobility to a masterpiece of cinema since too long disappeared from the screens. Applause fed for long minutes, chilled and moved room, admiring reviews from a conquered press: from up there, Jean Eustache had a very nice revenge. It must be said that when he came to Cannes for the film in 1973, things did not go the same way at all. If the film wins the Grand Prix, it is rewarded in a stormy climate. Ingrid Bergman, the president of the jury, hates him. The press denounces an annoying film where everything rings false. Gilles Jacob, not yet president of the festival but already a film critic, even said: “I think it’s a shitty film […]. I think it’s a non-film, not filmed by a non-filmmaker and played by a non-actor.” Nourished by his proximity to the New Wave, Jean Eustache pushes the obsessions of Godard, Rivette and the others to His sentimental long-running film – which lasts 3 hours 40 minutes, all the same –, directly inspired by his life and his loves, caused scandal and shocked as much by its extraordinary artistic proposal as by the moral perversions that he directs.The film therefore becomes a sea serpent difficult to watch, a cursed masterpiece.Invisible but not forgotten, its myth only grows.Those who manage to see it generally discover it on copies pirates who are passed from hand to hand like sacred relics. restored version and express their proud t to give this great film a second life in the cinema. A long film trip After May 68, in a poetic and sensual Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Alexandre, played by a casual Jean-Pierre Léaud, as funny as annoying, is an idle dandy who spends his time reading on café terraces, strolling around Paris to draw inspiration for a book he will never write and, above all, seducing the fairer sex. having not the slightest penny, he lives off Marie, his older mistress who works in a fashion boutique, but at the same time tries to win back his former girlfriend, Gilberte, who keeps pushing him away. Just as she has just rebuffed his advances one last time during a meeting on the Deux Magots terrace, Alexandre catches the eye of Veronika, a fiercely free nurse, whom he immediately falls under the spell of. Then begins an astonishing love triangle between the young man, his mistress and this mysterious apparition. Alexandre doesn’t hide his links with the other from either of them, he doesn’t see the problem and that doesn’t seem to be a problem either for the two women who appreciate each other. But little by little, things get worse, and this incorrigible kid has to choose between the mother and the whore. Eustache is the mischievous painter of procrastination in love. A bittersweet tale, La Maman et la putain is a long cinematic trip of 3 hours 40 minutes that we would never like to see stop. With an extraordinary narrative amplitude, a crazy freedom of tone, dialogues conceived as sublime literary flights and an extremely stripped down production, it is a masterpiece that suspends time and the manifesto of a cinema spellbinding anti-modern. Back in theaters, run to see this monument. For Jean Eustache, Alexandre, Marie, Veronika, a second life can begin.© AFP – Bernard Prim / Collection ChristopheL © Elite Films / Cine Qua Non / Les Films du Losange
