Jean Eustache’s color follow-up to his black-and-white masterpiece The Mother and the Whore (1973), detailing his adolescence in the south of France, has never been distributed in the U.S., but some devotees of the director’s work actually prefer this 123-minute feature to its lengthy predecessor, and there’s no question that it seems to get better and better over time. Writing in these pages, Dave Kehr called its unsubtitled version “an original and disturbing treatment of that most commercial of themes, a young boy’s coming of age. Eustache’s protagonist (Martin Loeb) is a dark, lonely child who is taken from his grandmother’s home in the country to live with his mother (Ingrid Caven) and his Spanish stepfather in the city; he discovers not only sexuality but work, boredom, isolation, and — as in The Mother and the Whore — the unbreachable otherness of women. Photographed in summer colors by Nestor Almendros, the film is quiet and visual where Mother was verbal.” This 1974 feature also has one of the most memorably erotic film references in the cinema — a showing of Albert Lewin’s terminally romantic Pandora and the Flying Dutchman in a movie house. Read more
My column for a Spanish monthly film magazine, submitted in mid-December 2021. — J.R.
What first led me to Radu Jude’s provocative Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn wasn’t the Golden Bear it won in Berlin. Ever since Titanie received the Palme d’Or at Cannes, I’ve figured that any film, no matter how silly, can win the top prize at a major film festival. It was mostly the declaration of J. Hoberman in Artforum, who listed it first in his 2021 Top Ten and called it “the movie with the most relentless focus on the way we live now.”
In certain ways, Jude’s feature recalls Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism half a century ago. A few of the parallels: an awkward two-part title; an Eastern European filmmaker examining the complex relationships between sex and politics, with pessimism about some of the consequences of sexual liberation and the brutal victimizing of a politically lucid heroine; a heady mix of various materials and different forms of discourse, including a bold fusion of fiction and documentary; a lot of footloose shooting on urban streets. But insofar as Hoberman’s claim for the film seems both apt and important, it isn’t really similar to Makavejev’s masterpiece because it comes out of a very different period—during a global pandemic, not during or just after the countercultural 1960s. Read more
