‘Pratiquement plus rien d'intéressant ne se passe’: Jean Eustache's La Maman et la Putain

Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain: A film maudit twice over?

“…Whether this is through drunkenness, possible pregnancy or both, it manifestly symptomatises the incapacity of the film’s plethora of words – what Michel de Certeau was to call in his reflections on the events of May 1968 La Prise de parole – to resolve its terminal impasse. La Maman et la putain has thus sometimes been read as a despondent farewell to the exalted and garrulous hopes raised in May (see Reader, 1993). Like La Règle du jeu , it reflects and diffracts a time of acute social and political crisis (in one case the eve of World War Two, in the other the sour and jaded aftermath of May 1968) through the interlocking and conflicting amours of its characters.…”