Jean-Pierre Léaud is a busy boy in THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE
THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (Jean Eustache, 1973)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Sunday, May 12, 2:30 & 7:00
Series runs May 8-23
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
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 film 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. Someone at BAM has a wicked sense of humor, as The Mother and the Whore is screening on Mother’s Day at 2:30 & 7:00 as part of the BAMcinématek series “Booed at Cannes,” consisting of films that did not exactly thrill the Cannes glitterati but have gone on to gain their own unique reputations, including Maurice Pialat’s Under the Sun of Satan, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse, David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, and David Cronenberg’s Crash.