Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

SparkMore n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

Beulah Bram A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Richard Chatten Three Parisians drink, smoke, copulate and talk, and talk, copulate, smoke and drink for three and a half hours. Much of the talk (in very basic language) is also about copulation, but, being a continental art movie from that brief, long ago idyll between the introduction of the Pill and before AIDS, no one actually seems to derive much pleasure from all this rutting. For anyone whose first language is not French, keeping up with the subtitles is a daunting challenge throughout.Jean-Pierre Léaud plays his usual self-centred, garrulous perpetual adolescent, and Bernadette Lafont disappointingly gets a fraction of the screen time of the other two corners of this particular triangle. Shot by Pierre Lhomme in what is presumably deliberately some of the ugliest black & white photography I've ever seen, it would be tempting to say that only in a movie could a prick like Alexandre find himself at the centre of a harem comprising two such formidable and willing females; but that, alas, is one aspect of the film that rings only too true.

mvanhoore In the late sixties a new wave of directors emerged from France. Instead of images dialogs were more important to them. Although there were more (art house) directors who put a lot of talking into their movies people like Jacques Rivette and Jean Eustache took it to the extreme.There are several reasons to dislike La Maman et la Putain: First reason is of course its length as mentioned by almost every reviewer I watched this movie in several parts which is really the best way to enjoy and analyze it. Second reason is the fact that it is shot in black and white. Good use of color could have added a lot of emotion and atmosphere. And the third reason is the cinematography. In almost every scene there is a static camera as if nothing has changed since the invention of cinema by the brothers Lumiere. A lot of reviewers add the fact that they cannot identify with protagonist Alexandre, a dandy with great disdain of people with a job who lives on the money of his girlfriend/patron Marie. For me that is no specific reason to dislike a movie. Just like I cannot identify myself with Alexandre I cannot with Hannibal Lector for example. There's no necessity to feel sympathy for the characters to make a good movie. For me it feels that Eustache cancelled all the practices that could distract the viewer from the dialogs, so no color, no movement and no editing. So let's concentrate on the characters and what they say. As I mentioned Alexandre is a layabout who spends his days hanging around in café's, flirting with women and listening to old recording by Marlene Dietrich or Edith Piaf. He is full of self-pity and believes that every recent historical event has happened to add misery to his live. He dislikes the people with regular jobs and a homely life. But in fact all he really wants is to live that kind of life with his former lover Gilberte. There's some talking that he abused her before she ran away from him, although I found that hard to believe regarding his passive character. While still mourning about his loss of Gilberte he met Veronica, a woman who reminds him of his the girl he lost. In endless monologues their relationship evolves sometimes loving each other tenderly and alternately act very crude. Veronica is nymphomane looking for the love of her life. She loves Alexandre but she also now that he is not the lover she's looking for. At first Alexandre's other lover Marie is amused by his advances to Veronica but soon she become jealous. At the end Veronica penetrates in the live of Alexandre and Marie and a love triangle develops.At the end you feel some sympathy for Alexandre. Although he is very rude to the women in his life and he is a lazy bastard he is also a great narrator of stories and quite funny. Although he talks about 75% of the whole movie there are not a lot of things you know from his past before his relationship with Gilberte. Jean-Pierre Léaud did great acting in his role of Alexandre. It is said that he improvises a great part of his role. I also sympathize with Veronica. She's longing for the great love of her life but all she finds are men who wanna sleep with her. She can be very crude (especially when drunk) but also very tender. The last scene hints at a pregnancy of her, probably with Alexandre as the father. For me it is impossible to say how the relationship between Alexandre and his two lovers should continue. It is clear that he needs Marie (and her money) to patron him. He loves her as a mother but what he really longs for is a pure woman like Gilberte. Sometimes Veronica reminds him of her but sometimes he is disgusted with her. I don't think that there is a very bright future for Alexandre. His relationship with Veronica creates a wedge in his relationship with Marie so in the end he will lose both his patron and his whore.Like I said I watched the movie in parts. It's certainly not easy entertainment but if you push through the beginning (Oh no! Not that kind of movie!) you are rewarded with a fine psychological drama. But if I have to compare it to other French movies of the Nouvelle Vague and the New Wave and if I look at all the reasons to dislike it I think that Eustache missed a masterpiece by ignoring the art of cinema and focusing on the art of dialogue.

dr_alexander_reynolds Well, as Goethe once said, there really isn't any point in trying to pass a negative judgement that aspires to be objective on "something that has had a great effect". "La Maman et La Putain" has surely passed into history as an influence on much of what's been done in France and elsewhere in the past thirty years and no one interested in the history of film, certainly, should be dissuaded from watching it. To express a purely subjective judgement, however, I feel compelled to disagree with almost every other review posted here and say to people: "Don't watch it; it's a waste of hours of your time that will just leave you feeling rather sick and angry." And by that I don't mean "sick and angry" about "the human condition" or anything so general and profound as that, because that is exactly the line that most critics have adopted in their fulsome praise of the film - "an ordeal to watch in its ruthless dissection of our emotional cowardice and cruelty" and so on - and, if it really managed to put across a universally or even broadly relevant message of this sort, then the director would have good reason to be satisfied with himself, however pessimistic his conclusions may be. My beef with the film is rather that I don't see this hours-long record of empty vanity and petty treachery as being justified or excused by any GENERALLY relevant message at all. All three main characters are deeply morally unattractive individuals: Alexandre to the greatest degree, of course, because we see by far the most of him and because he seldom shuts up for more than thirty seconds; Marie perhaps to the least degree, because we see the least of her. Alexandre's affected and pretentious monologues have a kind of amusement value, of course, but the amusement wears thin as one comes more and more clearly to realize that Jean-Pierre Léaud is most likely not even acting and that, with absurd remarks like "un homme beau comme un film de Nicholas Ray", he really was just reproducing word-for-word opinions that were accepted as authentic and profound by the milieu in which he, along with the director Eustache, had been living for about ten years by the time of the making of the film. I suppose if the tone of relentless superficiality and triviality had been sustained throughout 100% of the film, it might have worked as a long sardonic comedy about a particularly shallow, worthless and despicable post-'68 milieu. What made, however, this viewer at least extremely angry with the director was his granting of at least one lengthy scene each to Alexandre and Veronika in which we are clearly expected to empathize with and feel for them as if they shared a moral universe with us. If a man can get away with living in the flat of and professing to love one woman, sleeping (mostly in this very flat) with another, and running around Paris proposing marriage to yet a third, well, I suppose I can wish him the best of luck in the dog-eat-dog world he's chosen to create for himself. What I can't, however, in all conscience do is listen even for a moment to maudlin monologues from him in which he speaks about his "anxiety" and his "despair". The same goes double for the even more despicable Veronika, whom we are shown barging drunk into the apartment and even the bed shared by Marie and Alexandre and behaving there with an infantile inconsistency tantamount to the most savage and heartless cruelty. As I say, if "La Maman et La Putain" is intended to be nothing more nor other than a portrait of Alexandre, Veronika and Marie, three individuals whom any even halfway decent person would never admit into their company let alone their home, then I suppose there is a kind of legitimacy in praising the director for being "unflinching" (though why one should even feel like "flinching" once one had consciously opted to create such thoroughly repellent characters to filmically observe I can't imagine). The problem, however, is that the director is clearly convinced - and appears to have succeeded in convincing generations of critics - that Alexander, Veronika and Marie are somehow representative of human beings in general and of the limits of human beings' emotional capabilities. This latter idea, however, is arrant and offensive nonsense. There may indeed be an inherent fallibility and tendency to tragedy in human relations in general and sexual relations in particular. But the nature and degree of this fallibility and tendency to tragedy can only possibly be determined by people who make a sincere and serious effort to make such relations work. It surely needs no cinematic or authorial genius to convey to us the information that a man who behaves like Alexandre is going to end up hated, miserable, and alone, or that women who insist on expecting love from a man like Alexandre are going to end up disappointed and bitter. Watch "La Maman et La Putain" if you're historically interested in what passed for culture and human interaction in a certain post-'68 Parisian milieu which was probably, unfortunately, not restricted to just a few particularly anti-social types like these. But please don't make the mistake of believing that what is recorded here has any general relevance for humanity in the way that a film by Jean Renoir or Martin Scorsese might be argued to have.

patoprods If you enjoy French cinema then you are used to heavy dialogue and little action. Some ARE sleep-inducing, so the key is...BE AWAKE! Don't watch something like this on a small screen and without some degree of mental awakeness. I had the privilege of seeing this film within a festival and found it to be terrifically witty, sexy at points, and thought-provoking. I was engaged for nearly the entire length of the film, with the exception of a really protracted scene among the three principals towards the end. Anyway, boring is too easily said of long movies watched on videocassette. If you have some way of seeing it bigger, that's the way to catch it. And of all of Eustache's works the one I recommend most is Mes Petites Amoureuses ("My Little Loves") set in the world of children. Just amazing. Maybe someday it will be available for rent. It's very accessible and is as effective as Truffaut's Small Change.