The best nouvelle vague film is not from the nouvelle vague, although its existence cannot be understood without it: it is called La maman et la putain and it was directed in 1973 by Jean Eustache, a guy as passionate as he is intransigent, who ended his life on November 5, 1981, shooting himself in his Parisian apartment.
Eustache was born in Pessac, in the southwest of France, on November 30, 1938, into a working-class family. His adolescence was spent in Narbonne, where he performed various humble jobs and his vocation for cinema grew. In 1957, he moved to Paris and, after some initial difficult times –which included a suicide attempt and a period of psychiatric hospitalization–, he found refuge in the offices of Cahiers du Cinéma, where he spent hours engaged in social gatherings with Godard. , Rivette, Rohmer and most of the writing. However, he never gets to write a line in the magazine. His purpose is unique, determined: to make movies.
A desire that did not materialize until well into the sixties, with the medium-length films Les mauvaises fréquentations (1964) and Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (1966). According to legend, the first was largely financed by the looting of the Cahiers box… while the second had the direct financial help of Jean-Luc Godard. How could it be otherwise, both works give off a very nouvelle vague aroma, although in a more somber and hopeless tone.
The filmmaker then makes some documentaries of undoubted ethnographic interest, but the first feature length is waiting. Finally, with the complicity of the audacious producer Pierre Cottrell and the contribution of other friends (Truffaut, Rohmer, Schroeder…), Eustache embarked on the adventure of La maman et la putain, a low-budget production in 16mm. and in black and white, shot in seven weeks and few locations and with a reduced technical team.
It is the chronicle of a peculiar triangle made up of the idle and loquacious Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), the temperamental Marie (Bernadette Lafont), his lover and cohabitant, and the fickle Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), the latest conquest. from Alexandre, who would like him to get along with Marie and be tolerated by her. With a very direct autobiographical character –each character is a transcript of a real figure–, the almost four hours of the film exude an intensity and authenticity that is out of the ordinary. It is not only a feverish and accurate portrait of characters, but also the reflection of a disillusioned generation after the fading of the utopias of 1968.
Presented at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, the film provokes scandal among those who judge it as an exercise in impudence and lewdness, but there are many more who surrender to its overwhelming sincerity. It won the Special Jury Prize and the International Press Prize, immediately acquiring the status of a cult film that it will never lose.
Supported by this situation, the filmmaker immediately managed to film another feature film, this time with more comfortable means. The result, Mes petites amoureuses (1974), is again an autobiographical story, which describes the transition from childhood to adolescence of its protagonist. A film of commendable sensitivity, it treasures moments of profound poetic depth, but also factors that make it commercially difficult, such as its narrative prizeness, casting errors or the excessive weight of the influence of Robert Bresson’s cinema. The fact is that the public turns its back on him in a radical way and the doors of the industry close again for Eustache, this time permanently.
His subsequent short films and documentaries, although ingenious, seem, above all, a pretext to escape from inactivity. Frustrated and depressed, Eustache chooses to get out of this world with which he has fought so much, leaving as a legacy a short but forceful filmography, a faithful mirror of his rebellion.