LA MAMAM ET LA PUTAIN (220’)
(The Mother and the Whore)
by Jean Eustache
with Bernadette Lafont, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Françoise Lebrun
France, 1973
Restored by Les Films du Losange
With thanks to I Wonder Pictures
Introduced by Carmelo Marabello
Screening in original language with subtitles in Italian.
“After starting out as light comedy with witty dialogues, Eustache turns it into a chamber drama in which, with the camera still and in long sequence shots, the characters express their feelings, their malaise and the difficult search for a new morale”. (Morando Morandini)
“It is so obvious to consider La maman e la putain as a faithful portrayal of relationships as they changed after May 1968, that we often forget that there is a great fantastic film behind this cult work. Paris is described as a nightmare: the characters find it impossible to move away, to leave one another. The ville lumière devours its own children, as suggested by the many iris shots borrowed from silent film, or the slow fades at the end that absorb and smother the light (…): It is therefore no surprise that La maman et la putain is the story of an act of vampirization, by Véronika towards Alexandre. Replacing a woman as beautiful as night, all artifice and compulsions, with the one as beautiful as day, who abandons him, the young man is unaware that he is offering his body and soul to the vampire”. (Jean Douchet)
Salizada de la Chiesa o del Teatro
San Marco 3997/A
30124 Venice
Tel. +39 041 2417274
“The public was struck by the sincerity of the work, a mirror of the era: Rome under construction where buildings steal space, wages that are not enough, strikes, scabs, union leaders who don't listen, the only salvation lying in the sense of belonging”. (Gianluca Farinelli)
