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JEAN EUSTACHE RETROSPECTIVE: BLUE-COLLAR DANDYAmy Taubin / Village Voice / November 1 - 7, 2000
In the current issue of Film Comment, Harmony Korine names Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore "the greatest movie about love." It's easy to see how Korine would identify with Alexander (Jean-Pierre Léaud), the film's fragile, romantic, passive-aggressive, logorrheic protagonist, whose flood of fantasized selves and others could not drown his fear of sex, death, and the end of cinema. Made in 1972, this fairly autobiographical work (shot in the director's own apartment) is full of à clef references to New Wave directors with whom Eustache felt bitterly competitive, and grounded in the malaise that followed May '68. But it also shares and bares the anxiety about masculinity that fuels American films of the '70s from Carnal Knowledge to Taxi Driver, not to mention John Cassavetes's oeuvre‹an anxiety exacerbated by the so-called sexual-liberation movement and the subsequent rise of feminist consciousness. It's no accident that during the first conversation Alexander has with Veronika (Françoise Lebrun) - the young nurse whom he tries to entice into a ménage à trois with Marie (Bernadette Lafont), his older, richer live-in girlfriend - he makes a disparaging remark about women's lib. Veronika claims to know nothing about it, although her final drunken monologue, in which she rages against being identified as a whore by men terrified of her sexuality, shows that she's not as naive as she seems. Three and a half hours long, The Mother and the Whore is both epic and intimate, ethnographic in its cultural detail and subjective in its exposure of the raw nerves of body and psyche. It's Eustache's greatest cinematic achievement, though not his only significant one, as this near complete retrospective proves. Included is the 1966 short feature Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (which stars Léaud as a young man tired of being stuck in a small town who takes an embarrassing job so that he can buy the coat that everyone in Paris is wearing) and the deadpan documentary La Rosière de Pessac, for which Eustache returned to his birthplace in 1968 and again in 1979 to record the annual selection of the "most virtuous girl in town." Not to be missed is the 47-minute Une Sale Histoire, in which Jean Noel-Picq (Eustache's friend and occasional screenwriting collaborator) confesses to a voyeuristic compulsion so humiliating and ridiculous it provokes both pity and laughter - and Mes Petites Amoureuses, the feature Eustache made immediately after The Mother and the Whore. The film embodies his perverse refusal to capitalize on success. Abandoning Paris bohemia, Eustache returned to the two small working-class towns where he grew up to make a memory piece about a 12-year-old's first sexual explorations and his painful discovery that the adults who have the most power over him do not have his best interests at heart. Lyrically photographed by Néstor Almendros, and wonderfully acted by Martin Loeb (who plays Daniel, Eustache's childhood alter ego) and several other adolescent performers, Mes Petites Amoureuses lovingly details rituals of courtship and friendship. Daniel is a budding film buff, an unusually self-contained boy with observing eyes that give almost nothing of himself away. In one achingly precise scene, Daniel turns his attention from the screen (the film is that Cahiers du Cinéma favorite Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, starring Ava Gardner) to the kids near him who are engaged in a solemn ritual that involves a boy leaning into the next row and kissing the girl in front of him. Having observed a few of these intense, impersonal embraces, Daniel tries out the procedure himself. The most subtle of eye-openers, Mes Petites Amoureuses is a far more rigorous coming-of-age film than The 400 Blows. Eustache, who committed suicide in 1981, never achieved the recognition he deserved during his lifetime, but his films, which have hardly dated, have influenced French directors from Arnaud Desplechin to Claire Denis and Americans from Jim Jarmusch to Korine. 
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