Absolute Necessity

This article appeared in the July 6, 2023 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

A fringe member of the Cahiers du cinéma circle of film critics and directors, Eustache always stood apart from his peers. He was slightly younger than his cohort and had never been to university. As his former lover, actress Françoise Lebrun (who gives an electrifying performance in The Mother and the Whore), put it in a 2023 interview: “Jean was the only one from Cahiers du cinéma who wasn’t the son of a bourgeois. He came from a working-class family . . . Jean was like the ugly duckling of the group.” In 1981, following a car accident that left him partially paralyzed, Eustache took his own life at the age of 42. In the years since, his stature as an international icon among cineastes has become prodigious. Yet beyond The Mother and the Whore, most of his films have been unavailable to screen for decades, and in recent years even his masterpiece has scarcely been exhibited, due to the condition of existing prints. Providentially, Les Films du losange, the company that originally co-financed The Mother and the Whore, has of late restored 12 of Eustache’s films, including dramatic features, documentaries, and shorts. Now, 42 years after his death, a retrospective of his works will be held at Film at Lincoln Center before it travels to other venues across America.

An ardent moviegoer from childhood, Eustache moved at age 19 from the rural town of Pessac to Paris, where he worked as an electrician for the national railway company. Fearing that he might be conscripted to fight the war in Algeria, he attempted suicide, then spent a year in a psychiatric ward. Soon after, his wife Jeanne Delos, who worked as a secretary at Cahiers du cinéma, introduced him to the founding members of the magazine. Like Truffaut, Godard, and others, he started out as a film critic, and then, with their encouragement, took up filmmaking. Anthropologist and prolific filmmaker Jean Rouch, a Nouvelle Vague outlier, was an early influence on Eustache. Rouch’s interest in imbuing the documentary form with the emotionalism of dramatic fiction, as seen in his 1961 feature Chronicle of a Summer, informs Eustache’s directorial practice across the younger man’s filmography.

However, with the exception of the hybrid A Dirty Story (1977), which calls into question the very possibility of objective truth, most of Eustache’s documentaries do not push the boundaries of the form. What his documentary and fiction films share is a laser-sharp focus on the autobiographical, as if, through Rouch’s emotionally explosive blending of documentary and fiction techniques, Eustache discovered a method for transubstantiating his own experience into fiction. In the black-and-white feature documentary Numéro zéro (1971), the filmmaker interviews his grandmother, Odette, who raised him in Pessac—the village where she, Eustache’s mother, and the director himself were all born. Seated across the kitchen table from his grandmother, his back to the camera, Eustache chain-smokes and drinks whiskey while Odette delivers a mesmerizing, rapid-fire monologue. Her flow of words is interrupted every 15 minutes or so by Eustache’s clapboard, which calls attention to the act of storytelling itself and the artificiality inherent in even the simplest of cinematic setups. This gesture, Odette’s nervous turning of her whiskey glass, and Eustache’s constant playing with his cigar are the primary visual elements that punctuate Odette’s absorbing tale—the entirely of which is filmed in a nearly continuous single shot, with the camera probing in and out of tight close-ups as the old woman’s story unfolds. (Eustache would return to this intimate technique a few years later for the lengthy conversational scenes shared by Marie, Veronika, and Alexandre in The Mother and the Whore.)

The hardships and horrors Odette endures are recounted not with self-pity, but rather with irony and compassion even for those who have wronged her. These include a jealous and brutal stepmother who beat her, and a WWI veteran she marries who brings home the deep shame of a lawsuit for sleeping with a 13-year-old girl, as well a case of syphilis Odette narrowly escapes catching. The deepest sorrows of Odette’s life are related to limitations of gender, class, the deaths of children, and the loss of loved ones in two world wars. Her greatest joy, however, derives from taking care of children: she speaks excitedly about how life improved when, at the end of WWII, young Jean was sent by his mother to live with her at the age of 7.

The filmmaker, who was known to be extremely tight-lipped about his personal life, once declared that his films “are as autobiographical as fiction can be.” Still, in both documentary and dramatic works, he exercises an auteurist’s prerogative, only presenting the aspects of his life that he chooses. Odette’s influence—as both nurturer and storyteller—on Eustache is also undeniable, her spellbinding narrative suggesting that emotional pain can be gradually mastered, if not entirely healed, through retelling. In three autobiographical dramatic works that form a loose trilogy—Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes (1966), The Mother and the Whore, and My Little Loves (1974)—the filmmaker’s own familial traumas and understanding of class barriers provide the raw material for cinematic storytelling that achieves an uncommonly nuanced and fierce honesty.

My Little Loves (1974), the first part of the trilogy (though the last to be filmed), takes its title from a poem by Arthur Rimbaud that celebrates a young man’s unvarnished ambivalence for the women he desires. Daniel (played by a young Martin Loeb), is a sensitive, angry, and horny teenager in his first year of high school who lives with his kindly grandmother in Pessac. When his estranged mother unexpectedly comes to visit with her Spanish boyfriend, an awkward shyness overtakes him. In Numéro zéro, Odette reveals that when Eustache—a good student—stopped going to class around the age of 13, she sent him back to his mother in Narbonne. But in My Little Loves, it is Daniel’s overly made-up, seductively solicitous mother (played by the German singer and Fassbinder regular Ingrid Caven) who requests that Daniel come live with her in Narbonne. However, soon after Daniel settles into his mother’s shabby apartment, it becomes clear that La Mère (as the credits identify her) has other plans for him. In a few devastating scenes at the dinner table, Eustache lays bare the crippling ways in which class hierarchy and poverty are reproduced in microcosm within a family structure. La Mère and her live-in boyfriend’s forfeited dreams become cruelly matter-of-fact justifications for denying Daniel an education. If, as French film critic Serge Daney has said, “Eustache is an ethnologist of his own reality,” then class barriers are, for the director, reality’s ineluctable horizon.

Stigmatized for being too poor to attend school, Daniel finds pleasure in going to the cinema and hanging out with a group of slightly older teenage boys who spend their time watching girls. In Eustache’s ruthlessly unsentimental yet sympathetic depiction, heterosexual courtship becomes a predatory game in which his protagonist’s friends compete with each other for the attention of the young women they aggressively accost. Hostility and desire are two sides of the same coin here; the teenagers resent what they can’t have. Much to Daniel’s surprise, one of the girls they pester cedes to his advances. In the tender and delicate scene that follows, cinematographer Néstor Almendros captures the two prospective lovers from a low, intimate angle as they lie in the tall grass. They make out for a bit before she firmly informs him she won’t go any further, at which point he tells her—with a combination of defeat, sincerity, and cunning—that he just wants to look at her. Not unlike Rimbaud’s poetic persona, Eustache exposes the dark edge of Daniel’s internal power struggle with his desires.

Though the 47-minute Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes was made eight years before My Little Loves, it can be read as a sequel. The film’s central character (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) is also called Daniel, and the film likewise takes place in Narbonne. As in My Little Loves, this Daniel, who is in his twenties, shares his innermost thoughts through voiceover narration. Shot in black and white by Philippe Théaudière, Eustache’s frequent DP, the short’s use of low lighting and abundance of shadowy, velvet-black night scenes recall the Hollywood noirs that influenced many Nouvelle Vague directors. But instead of using this aesthetic in service of intrigue, here Eustache deploys it as a means of depicting the ways in which economic precarity shapes romantic life. A keen observer of social codes, Daniel, who earns money by reselling stolen books after reading them, laments the fact that young women dismiss any man not dressed in a suit. After spotting two dapper gentlemen walking down the street wearing fashionable duffle coats, he decides that a new coat is exactly what he needs. He takes a job as a street-corner Santa Claus to save up for his purchase, and, his face disguised by a long white beard, discovers a new confidence with women. When he’s ultimately rejected by a young woman who, curious to know his true identity, had agreed to meet with him, a close-up of Léaud’s face echoes Loeb’s vulnerable expression at the moment when La Mère crushes the younger Daniel’s dreams in My Little Loves.

Flashes of a similar boyish vulnerability appear in Léaud’s portrayal of Alexandre, the dandyish, brilliant, pretentious, often hilarious man-child at the center of The Mother and the Whore. It’s a role Eustache wrote with the actor in mind for his most viscerally autobiographical work, and the culmination of his multi-film exploration of the vagaries of male desire. The Mother and the Whore was inspired by Eustache’s relationships with some of the women involved in its making: as Lebrun reports in a recent interview timed to a celebration of the film’s 50th anniversary at Cannes this year, “La Maman et la putain [the original title] was, at this exact moment in his life, an absolute necessity.” The nearly-four-hour film traces a painful love triangle comprising Alexandre; his live-in lover Marie (Bernadette Lafont), a slightly older clothing-store owner; and Veronika (Lebrun), a nurse who regales Alexandre with straightforward accounts of her many sexual encounters, and with whom he begins an affair while recovering from a breakup with Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten), a pretty student who does not return his feelings. The character of Marie was based on Catherine Garnier, who worked on the film as a costume designer, providing both her apartment and clothing shop as shooting locations.

Apparently, Léaud struggled with the challenge of memorizing such a lengthy script, but Eustache was adamantly against improvisation—according to Lebrun, “the dialogue was set in stone.” Although both the film’s story and production process strongly overlapped with Eustache’s personal life, the director sought to maintain a distinction between art and existence, documentary and fiction, by adhering strictly to the written word. Tragically, Garnier killed herself shortly after the early screenings, leaving a note for Eustache that said, “The film is sublime, leave it as it is.” After learning of her suicide, Eustache himself suffered a nervous breakdown. The melancholy that suffuses The Mother and the Whore can thus be understood in various ways: as a reflection of both the collective disillusionment of a generation, post-’68, and, on a more personal level, of the the fragility of the individuals and the relationships the film portrays.

Eustache’s probing and sardonic reflections on sexuality, sexism, and class transform what, in a lesser director’s hands, might have been mere confessional material into a powerful and poetic form of social critique. His gift was to reveal, with understated perceptiveness and humor, how class not only defines social reality but also shapes the inner lives of the strivers and working-class people who fill his films. For Eustache, the only way to relieve the inevitable pain of living was through cinema’s singular ability to transform it into stories we tell each other, and ourselves—an absolute necessity, as he learned at a very young age from his grandmother.

Lisa Katzman is a documentary filmmaker, screenwriter, and journalist who has written about film, art, politics, music, the environment, and food for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Mother Jones, Film Comment, Interview, and Saveur, among other publications.