The Mother And The Whore

If any film signified that the French New Wave had come to an end, it was THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, a grueling three-and-a-halfhour study that may be one of the more enlightening works the cinema has ever produced. Set against a background of Paris cafes and tiny one-room apartments, it traces the amorous adventures of Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud), an irresponsible young man who pretends to be a leftist intellectual. He is really little more than a victim of the postwar existentialist thought that paved the way for the materialistic attitudes of the early 1970s and a generation filled with empty ideals. One morning, Alexandre feels an extraordinary need to marry. ...