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Trailer Watch: 4K Restoration of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore

Janus Films has released a trailer for the 4K restoration of Jean Eustache’s 1973 opus The Mother and the Whore, which will open at New York’s Film at Lincoln Center on June 23.

An official synopsis of the restoration reads:

After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May ’68 came The Mother and the Whore, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache that captured a disillusioned generation navigating the post-idealism 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless, Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a dalliance with the younger, sexually liberated Veronika (Françoise Lebrun, Eustache’s own former lover), leading to a volatile open relationship marked by everyday emotional violence and subtle but catastrophic shifts in power dynamics. Transmitting his own sex life to the screen with a startling immediacy, Eustache achieves an intimacy so deep it cuts.

The new 4K restoration will be accompanied by a comprehensive retrospective of Eustache’s films, entitled “The Dirty Stories of Jean Eustache,” which will run at the theater from July 7-13 and include screenings of the director’s second (and final) narrative feature, My Little Loves, alongside other mid-length and short films helmed by Eustache.

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