The late sixties brought a revolutionary fervour not only to France but to the whole world. It altered people's minds, it opened them up, it intellectualised people, it introduced many millions to new ideas in terms of culture in general. It renewed, refreshed, invigorated, and even if Mai 1968 failed to bring down France, it produced such profound, long-lasting effects which meant the world would never be the same again.
And yet just over fifty years after les événements France is still reeling from the shockwaves of the revolution that both was and wasn't. Vanessa Springora's revelations about the paedophile Gabriel Matzneff in Le Consentement reverberated and threw up buried facts about intellectual France's history of tolerance for paedophilia: The newspaper Libération's stance, the stance of many prominent intellectuals, the fact that the then leader of the Académie Goncourt, Bernard Pivot, had glibly welcomed Matzneff on Apostrophes as late as 1990, were hugely damning facts.
Unlike glib people claim with ignorant insults of 'soixante-huitards' in France (or the slightly different 'Boomer!' insult in the Anglophone world), it's not the sixties that are to blame, but the excesses of it. If the intellectual world pushed so far that even paedophilia was to be accepted, what of conventional heterosexual behaviour? If Philip Larkin was too late to join in the sexual jamboree, what of those who didn't gain from the release of the sexual shackles, but lost out from the excesses of it? And was sexual freedom really such a positive thing for women? All right, it may be significant that the main (male) figure of Jean Eustache's La Maman et la Putain teaches one of the two (female) figures what MLF (Mouvement de liberation des femmes) stands for, but then he's speaking from his imaginary ivory tower, dressed with his foulard round his neck in a faux-casual manner, and brandishing his copy of Proust's La Prisonnière (a novel of possessive, jealous love) at now iconic places such Les Deux Magots and Le Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés – but he's only a male chauvinist hypocrite*, an intello à la con. In 1973, La Maman et la putain heralded the end of the sixties, but not many people were listening.
Eustache's film – the importance of which we've perhaps only relatively recently begun to understand – stars the Nouvelle Vague icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as Alexandre, an intellectual layabout who sponges off his older live-in girlfriend Marie (Françoise Lebrun), the 'maman' who owns a fashionable clothes business. It also stars Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), the nurse who's taken full advantage of the new sexual freedom and has a penchant for alcohol (she's the 'putain', of course); she also has a penchant for Alexandre, and doesn't mind that he can't pick up the tab for the meal they have at Le Train bleu inside the Gare de Lyon. Alexandre spends most of his time flitting about the germainopratin cafés talking to friends (one of whom has an unhealthy interest in the Gestapo) and chatting up the women, playing with their affections: he has the youth and the looks so he thinks he can get away with it: unfortunately he's too immature to realise that he's playing with fire, that you still can't trifle with people's affections through the sexual freedom that's been newly accepted.
The crunch comes when Veronika falls in love with Alexandre and the three end up in bed together: it's not quite triolism (the utopia of the sixties Jimi Hendrix boasted of) but eventually all three of them come to love one another, which is of course a major problem. And it's a problem which concludes the film. Alexandre, with the trio fully clothed on the bed (there's nowhere else to sit anyway) tries to grab a breast of Veronika (who not so long before has insistently pleaded 'Baisez-moi !' ('Fuck me!'), which he does and which leads to Marie taking too many pills – the rules for the new morality haven't been written in stone. But this time Alexandre is violently rebuffed, and Veronika unleashes a long tear-soaked existential howl of pain. This of course is the crux of the issue: Alexandre's egocentric behaviour has boxed all three of them into a corner and it's now pay-off time.
Veronika's rant is stunning, almost definitely the major feature of the film, in which she at first tells Alexandre that sex is nothing, and continues to cry and launches into a drunken monologue in which the word 'baiser' ('fucking') is mentioned many times. It's this speech that is almost symbolic of the death of the sexual revolution, and yet (particularly with its emphasis on sex being necessary for children, and children being necessary) it is so devastating that it almost seems to be advocating a return to pre-sexual revolutionary times. The film ends with Alexandre driving Veronika back to her flat and she pukes into a bowl, leaving him to sit on the kitchen floor in a kind of stupor, at a loss to know what to do. Two women are in love with him, and both are suicidal: time to grow up?
La Maman et la putain is a major work in which the silences are often filled in by the music played in Marie's flat, which tends to be not of the period but before: Marie plays Piaf singing 'Les Amants de Paris'; Veronika sings Tino Rossi's 'Tout simplement', a love song, to Alexandre; and Alexandre plays Damia's 'Un souvenir' and Fréhel's 'La Chanson des Fortifs', a song about a lost Paris, by extension a France that has lost its old songs and singers, and will be renewed by others because there'll always be songs. There'll always be collective moods as well, and La Maman et la Putain brilliantly reflects the death of one.
*The Title La Maman et la putain is of course ironic, being the traditional way chauvinistic men see women: as mothers or prostitutes.
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