Jean-Pierre Léaud is a busy boy in THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE
THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (Jean Eustache, 1973)
Neue Galerie, Café Fledermaus
1045 Fifth Ave. at 86th St.
Monday, May 3, free, 4:00
212-628-6200
www.neuegalerie.org/programs/film-series
Jean-Pierre Léaud gives a bravura performance in Jean Eustache’s New Wave classic about love and sex in Paris following the May 1968 cultural revolution. Léaud stars as Alexandre, a jobless, dour flaneur who rambles on endlessly about politics, cinema, music, literature, sex, women’s lib, and lemonade while living with current lover Marie (Bernadette Lafont), obsessing over former lover Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), and starting an affair with new lover Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), a quiet nurse with a rather open sexual nature. The film’s three-and-a-half-hour length will actually fly by as you become immersed in the complex characters, the fascinating dialogue, and the excellent acting. Much of the movie consists of long takes in which Alexandre shares his warped view of life and art in small, enclosed spaces, the static camera focusing either on him or his companion. The film is screening on May 3 as part of the Neue Galerie’s Battlefields film series, featuring works involving soldiers in WWI, in conjunction with the current exhibit focusing on World War I veteran Otto Dix. The series concludes May 10 with Albert and Allen Hughes’s FROM HELL, starring Johnny Depp.