Leaud, Jean-Pierre (1944- )

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    ‘The Mother and the Whore’: A Threesome and Then Some

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    Jean Eustache’s digitally restored 1973 film, now at Lincoln Center, is part of a full retrospective of his work.Jean Eustache’s unwieldy first feature “The Mother and the Whore” — a transfixing 215-minute talkathon, as well as a cause célèbre since its world premiere at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival — feels less like a masterpiece than a rogue asteroid careening toward your particular home planet.Shown at last year’s New York Film Festival, the 4K digital restoration is screening at Lincoln Center June 23-July 13 as part of a full Eustache retrospective.Eustache, a onetime critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, considered “The Mother and the Whore” autobiographical. Set in the aftermath of France’s May 1968 civil unrest, it concerns a ménage-à-trois. Alexandre, a voluble slacker played by the embodiment of Parisian youth, Jean-Pierre Léaud, is being kept by the slightly older Marie (Bernadette Lafont, herself a New Wave signifier) while he pursues a young, sexually liberated nurse, Veronika (Eustache’s former lover Françoise Lebrun).Alexandre is a creature of impulse and a monster of insistence. Adopting and discarding attitudes, he is given to absurd, self-hypnotizing rants that fascinate Veronika, charm Marie, and appall the viewer as when he holds forth on the satisfaction of washing dishes while watching Marie perform the chore.A dandy who reads Proust and listens to Édith Piaf, Alexandre is obsessed with the past, mainly the aborted revolution of 1968. He is also delusional. “What novel do you think you’re in?” exclaims a former girlfriend whom he has ambushed to make a manic proposal of marriage.Marie, sufficiently grounded to own a boutique (although she and Alexandre live like students with a mattress on the floor), is indulgent and emotional. Veronika, self-contained and frank about her active sex life, is perhaps as crazy as Alexandre. Certainly, as her final soliloquy reveals, she is the most desperate of the three. A neophyte actor caught between two icons, Lebrun delivers an extraordinary performance.“The Mother and the Whore” is largely conversations, in cafes, parked cars and bed. It is filled with movie references but, as suggested by Alexandre’s ex, feels as dense and psychologically resonant as a novel — maybe one by Dostoyevsky. Viewing despair through the prism of sex, the movie has things in common with “Last Tango in Paris,” including Léaud. It is, however, a more anguished and compassionate film. In not quite the last word, a petulant Marie puts on a scratched LP to serenade us with the jaunty bitterness of Piaf’s self-reflexive “Les Amants de Paris.”In 1974, “The Mother and the Whore” was brutally reviewed by the New York Times critic Nora Sayre, who lambasted the film as a reversion to “the movie-sludge of the nineteen-fifties.” There’s nothing particularly ’50s here except the black-and-white cinematography, but Sayre’s complaint is telling: “The discoveries of the last decade have been erased. Or else the sixties never happened.” Exactly. The movie is a eulogy.Eustache made several more personal features before killing himself in 1981. The French critic Serge Daney called him “an ethnologist of his own reality,” adding that Eustache gave a face to the “lost children” of May ’68: “Without him, nothing would have remained of them.”The Mother and the WhoreThrough July 13 at Film at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; filmlinc.org. More

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      ‘Face’ Review: Close Encounters

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      Commissioned by the Louvre, the film brings together two of cinema’s unforgettable faces, Lee Kang-sheng and Jean-Pierre Léaud.There are some filmmakers whose cinema can be distilled into a single face. François Truffaut is one of them: Jean-Pierre Léaud’s roguish mien became, through Truffaut’s films, synonymous with the spirit of the French New Wave. The Malaysian Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, a devotee of Truffaut, is another. His films double as a record of the face of his muse, Lee Kang-sheng, captured closely in all its gradations over time.Commissioned by the Louvre Museum, Tsai’s 2009 film, “Face,” brings Lee and Léaud’s great visages together. Lee plays a director, Kang, who is in Paris to film a movie in the Louvre about the biblical story of Salome. Léaud plays an aging actor named Antoine — like his character in Truffaut’s films — while Fanny Ardant (Truffaut’s partner until his death in 1984) appears as a vexed producer.Time is the narrative principle in “Face.” Scenes of extended duration invite us to explore details within the frame, as one might with a painting, while the impending death of Kang’s ailing mother (Lu Yi-ching) casts a shadow of mortality over the film — particularly over Léaud and Lee, who appear at times like past and future reflections of one another.The film unfolds as a series of tableaux whose preciousness is tempered by hints of perversity: lust, incest, slapstick and, above all, the strange labor of filmmaking. At one point, we see Laetitia Casta, who plays Salome, in extreme close-up as Kang’s crew debates how to make her look colder. His assistants wipe her cheeks and rub ice on them while she remains uncomfortably silent. Her face is both a decorative mask and a fragile container of roiling emotion, encapsulating the wry duality of Tsai’s cinema.FaceNot rated. In French, Mandarin and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The 400 Blows,’ a Directing Debut That Still Astonishes

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      In 1959, François Truffaut premiered his first film, about a Parisian boy playing hooky, and moviemaking hasn’t been the same since.One of the most impressive debuts in film history, François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” created a sensation at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and elsewhere. It was voted the best foreign film of the year by New York film critics — a movie that “brilliantly and strikingly reveals the explosion of a fresh creative talent,” Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times.Showing for two weeks at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration, the movie is not only crucial to one’s film education but well worth revisiting.“Amazingly, this vigorous effort is the first feature film of M. Truffaut, who had previously been (of all things!) the movie critic for a French magazine,” Crowther noted. As a critic, Truffaut was particularly harsh on French “quality” films — so much so that Cannes denied him accreditation in 1958. Revenge was swift when he returned the following year and won the award for best director. (Marcel Camus’s “Black Orpheus” received the Palme d’Or. The third French film in competition, Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” came up empty.)“The 400 Blows” has two stars. One is the then-14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, who plays Truffaut’s alter ego, Antoine Doinel, and thus began a career as the embodiment of the French new wave. The other is the city of Paris — gray, grimy and glorious — the arena for Antoine’s fleeting joys and petty crimes.Antoine is an unwanted child, as was Truffaut. Punished by his teacher, rejected by his self-centered mother (Claire Maurier), he plays hooky, runs away from home, steals a typewriter, gets busted trying to return it, is booked by the cops and winds up in reform school. The movie is full of actual incidents from Truffaut’s childhood, including his fabricating his mother’s death as an excuse for truancy. Few movies have been so personal.“The 400 Blows” is dedicated to the critic André Bazin, Truffaut’s mentor, who died just as the movie began shooting. The early scenes of the boy’s classroom misadventures strongly recall “Zero de Conduite,” the 1933 sendup of French education, directed by Truffaut’s great influence, Jean Vigo. There are other, more inside references, including the unlikely notion that Antoine’s parents might see a quasi-underground work-in-progress by Truffaut’s colleague Jacques Rivette, “Paris Belongs to Us.”“The 400 Blows” is a landmark film for several reasons. It was likely the first openly autobiographical commercial feature, and as such caused Truffaut’s parents considerable distress. It also introduced one of the 1960s’ most resilient clichés — the concluding freeze-frame close-up. Truffaut got the idea from Harriet Andersson’s accusatory stare at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s “Summer with Monika” (as noted when Antoine steals a lobby card of Andersson’s “Monika”). But building on the wistful refrain that runs throughout, “The 400 Blows” ends on a note of sadness all its own.Truffaut and Leaud returned several times to the character of Antoine Doinel. Film Forum is showing “The 400 Blows” with rotating screenings of later films like “Stolen Kisses” and “Love on the Run.” The character survives and even thrives. Yet it is the heartbreaking last shot of “The 400 Blows” that will fix his identity for as long as there are movies.The Four Hundred BlowsSept. 23 through Oct. 6 at Film Forum in Manhattan; filmforum.org More