Marathon French Film `Mother' Is A Probing Study Of Characters

Movie review XXX 1/2 "The Mother and the Whore" (La Maman et la Putain), with Jean-Pierre Leaud, Bernadette Lafont, Francoise Lebrun, Isabelle Weingarten. Directed and written by Jean Eustache. 215 minutes. Grand Illusion, today through Thursday. No rating; includes frank sexual discussions.

Widely regarded as the key French film of the 1970s, as well as a kind of summing-up of the radical New Wave of French filmmakers that had arrived in the late 1950s, Jean Eustache's "The Mother and the Whore" has never had a theatrical run in Seattle until now.

One reason is the running time: This black-and-white movie, which is made up mostly of people talking in small, cluttered hippie pads, is longer than "Titanic" and just a few minutes shorter than "Gone With the Wind." At first it can seem shallow and unrewarding: another tale of selfish, navel-gazing young people sorting out their lives.

Eventually, however, the marathon quality of the material becomes a positive factor, allowing us to get below the cool surface of these characters and explore the tarnished idealism that defines and limits their inner lives. Under Eustache's direction, the actors respond by giving their all.

Jean-Pierre Leaud, who spent years trying to match the brilliant work he did as the 12-year-old hero of Francois Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" (1959), turns in the performance of his career. Around the same time he made "The Mother and the Whore," he was playing secondary leads in Truffaut's "Day for Night" and Bernardo Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris," both of which could easily have been made without him.

He is, however, essential to Eustache's film. Leaud brings a brutal emotional honesty to the role of Alexandre, a restless slacker who is supported by an older woman, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), who puts up with his affairs and his sexist habits. During one day, he proposes to an old girlfriend, Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), who rejects him, and starts a new relationship with a nurse, Veronika (Francoise Lebrun).

A menage a trois seems inevitable, but the story turns dark just when it seems to be edging into French fluff. Marie's jealousy turns suicidal, Veronika's apparently casual attitude toward the sexual revolution turns out to be a facade, and Alexandre stops relying on chauvinistic charm. By film's end, we feel as if we've been through the wringer with them.

Eustache's screenplay is specifically set against the backdrop of the failed student revolts of the late 1960s, and occasionally the sight of Leaud in bellbottoms makes it look like a time capsule. Yet the moods, the emotions, the debates seem profoundly contemporary (the sex talk is also less inhibited than in most films of that period).

Eustache was almost 43 when he killed himself in 1981. He never made another film that is regarded as the equal of this one, which took both the Special Jury Prize and the International Critics' Prize at Cannes in 1973. But all by itself, "The Mother and the Whore" established him as one of the essential filmmakers of his generation.