Word: veronika
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...drag us through a murky decadence that has lost touch with even a sense of style until all it has left is ennui, automatic sex and hyper-self-consciousness. According to this view, the burden of the film is carried by the long, emotional monologue of a woman named Veronika (Francois Lebrun) who tells us that "the only time sex isn't sordid is when two people want to have a child." In this vein, you could talk about The Mother and the Whore as if it were an ethical statement about "purification" or "self-knowledge." But the total effect...
...point, Veronika turns towards the audience and says, "In a bad film, that is what would be called the message." The implication is that only bad films have messages. Eustache made his film bulletproof against interpretation; it succeeds in finally smothering the impulse to find a pattern, while giving us just enough on the surface--of profanity, wit, and nudity--to keep our interest. There is an air of parody about parts of the film--Alexandre, for example, dresses precisely like Eustache himself. In the middle of her tearful confessional Veronika rises from the floor and slyly mocks...
...FILM'S FALSE ending shows this ambiguity best: After Veronika's monologue, Alexandre leaves to drive her home; and Marie is left alone, lying on her bed, her head against the wall. She puts on a song by Marlene Dietrich and when the song is over the audience expects the film to be over: Veronika has just delivered a devastating judgment about the lives of Alexandre and Marie; she seems determined to walk out of their lives. Instead, Eustache returns to Alexandre and Veronika and the audience titters in annoyance that the film isn't finished yet, that an easy...
...first to refer separately to each of Alexandre's women. The whore would be the desperately promiscuous nurse. The mother appears to be the severe Marie, whose bursts of passion and stern, sometimes hysterical anger draw Alexandre to her. It becomes clear after a time, though, that both Veronika and Marie share the same qualities. They are, in fact, reciprocals of each other, embodiments of the masculine ideal of the female, mother and whore at once...
...time the movie ends, the title has assumed a deadly irony. Alexandre becomes the victim of his own limited ideas of sexual identity. He is seduced by Veronika's pathology. In his desperation, he sees marriage as the only means to stop the terrible pain and destruction that have flowed between them. Hysterical with hurt and fatigue, Veronika accepts his proposal, and the numbness of an impermanent stalemate descends on both of them...