Word: whore
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MOTHER AND THE WHORE...
Three people seduce, wound and demolish one another, all in the name of love. Their poor posturings and deceits, their volatile cartridges of passion, inflict unhealing wounds. The Mother and the Whore is a harrowing psychodrama of destruction...
...title of this quite remarkable French film assumes inflections of meaning as the weights and balances of the relationships shift. It appears at 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...
...Mother and the Whore has the energy and quick, almost surreptitious illumination of the best improvised work. The low-contrast black and white photography gives the film a cool, as tringent look that cuts nicely against the gathering force of the script. Jean Eustache, who is 35 and whose previous work (Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes) has been shown in the U.S. only at a few museums, planned every move and wrote every word of the 3½-hour assault. The length, which hurts only occasionally, is a part not only of the design of the film but its final...
...Phil D'Antoni, as well as The Laughing Policeman's Stuart Rosenberg, are interested mainly in zapping their audiences. Force's liberal apologia count for naught when the director's only feeling is for carnage (a man's head getting shorn by a girder, or a pimp choking a whore with Draino). And The Seven-Ups' story of mixed roots in Little Italy--strong Buddy grows up to be a cop, while his weak friend Vito turns crook--is naturalism used to lubricate the gore machine. The Laughing Policeman is most barbarous of all: it primes viewers for two hours...