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Customer Reviews of The Mother and the Whore

As Alexandra is walking past a cafe one day constantly on the look-out, he catches the eye of Veronika and decides that she will be his next adventure. Without a moments hesitation he chases after her as she leaves the cafe and says, "I haven't time to go for a drink at the moment but will you give me your telephone number?" She does, and from that moment Marie finds herself with some serious competition. At first she is so sure of Alexandria's love that she is even willing to allow Veronika to share their bed! Only later does she have misgivings and pangs of jealousy.

Veronika is far from being your wholesome girl-next door, she too is addicted to sex and offhandedly mentions that she has been with a great many men in the five years since her 20th birthday. Being a nurse she says makes it easy for her.

Alexandra is an idle, narcissistic, garrulous intellectual who will spout his ideas to anyone willing to listen. He has that much in common with Veronika; both have long scenes in which they talk in close-up directly to the camera. Because of this and because there are so many of these scenes and the film is so long, you have a real sense of getting to know the characters. There is one long scene in which nothing happens at all but which didn't bore me for a moment. Marie, alone, puts on a long-playing record and then lies on the mattress on the floor in her sparsely furnished shambles of a bed-sit and we listen with her to the whole of one long track of music. Apart from lifting her hand to her face at one point she does nothing and yet we feel sympathy for her and feel we know her better at the end of it.

Such uneventful scenes are a characteristic of French films and are what make them seem so realistic and true to life. They seem realistic because in real life we do listen for long periods to others talking, and we do listen to music with others in silence, and because we are with these people as we are with friends in real-life. Thus the length of the film is a positive advantage. I recommend it.

brilliant (8/10)
first off, let me start off by defining my rating system so you can get a grasp on how brilliant this film is. There is only one film that i consider amazing (9/10) and that is Full Metal Jacket. there are a handful of others clustered at 8, but it is a very selected few (i.e., LaStrata, Persona, apaclopyse now)

why is this movie so brilliant? well, for starters, it has something that most foreign films, as well as movies in general, lack -- origionalliy. No, this film is not like the other foreign films that you have seen that rant on about harsh childhoods under a catholic upbringing and how everything depresses them (although those can be interesting).

The movie is the story of a person feeling towards love, and how a person's grasp on love continues to change.

if you find yourself going to the video store every week trying to find a movie with anwesers, this is the movie that you have been waiting to stumble apon.

My Favorite Movie
Although made in 1973, this movie captures the essence of what it was to be alive in the extraordinary era we call "The Sixties." I think my favorite scene is one where Marie comes home, puts a record on the turntable (the language itself is '60's!), and listens to it in real time. The moment is at once audacious and banal. Here is all the painful retrospection, narcissism, and struggle to connect that characterizes that era. I cannot think of another film that hits the note so exactly.