Jean Eustache

Jean Eustache
"The films I made are as autobiographical as fiction can be."

Filmmaker and screenwriter Jean Eustache had a brief but important career in French cinema. His best-known film was 1973’s Mother and the Whore, an intense character study credited for marking a new phase in French filmmaking. He got his start as a director assisting such New Wave filmmakers as Godard during the 1960s. In the late ’60s, he launched his own directorial career with two features. While they garnered some acclaim, it was not until Mother and the Whore, his third feature, that the full depth of his talent and sensitivity was recognized. The film won the Grand Prix and the International Critics Award at Cannes. Through the 1970s, Eustache made several films for television and then made one last feature in 1975, Mes Petites Amoureuses. Eustache committed suicide in the early 1980s.

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Runtime: 123 minutes
Year: 1974
Country: France
Alternate Titles: Mes petites amoureuses

After the success of The Mother and the Whore, Eustache was finally able to make Mes petites amoureuses, an equally personal but vastly different film – a portrait of his childhood in the south of France in which every footstep, every gesture, and every visual detail feels as though it's been drawn directly from the filmmaker's memory. This is a fantastic and wonderful coming of age story - maybe the best of its kind that I've seen. Truly the work of incredibly capable hands.

Young Martin Loeb plays Daniel, Eustache's adolescent alter ego, and he figures in every scene of this magnificent movie, which takes a hard look at adolescence and budding adulthood, at the realities of love and work. Beautifully photographed by the great Nestor Almendros, Mes petites amoureuses (the title is taken from the French poet Arthur Rimbaud). With Fassbinder regular Ingrid Caven as Daniel's mother and, in a small role, director Maurice Pialat.

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A humongous effort, this epic 4-hour dialogue is one of the finest movies in the history of world cinema. This movie is a nail in the coffin of the French New Wave and one of the strongest statements about the aftermath of the failed French revolution of May 1968, but also a definitive expression of the closing in of Western culture after the end of the era generally known as the 60s. But it registers in 2011 like something we’re still living inside: a terminal collapse of will and hope and a mistrust of freedom that all too often passes for the human condition. The fact that the film’s writer-director committed suicide in his early 40s, in 1981, seems only to ratify the film’s bleak portrait not just of where we are today but of who we are.

Over the course of a few days, we follow a dandyish French intellectual in his late 20s named Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud), who’s living with and supported by his lover, Marie (Bernadette Lafont) and a former girlfriend, Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten).

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Bad Company: Robinson's Place and Santa Clause Has Blue Eyes

Spectacle presents two new translations, made by and for Spectacle, of Eustache's early shorts. Together, these shorts are title Bad Company (Les mauvaises fréquentations) even though they were shot three years apart. Both could equally be titled, "Boys Behaving Badly." Both shine a non-judgemental spotlight on the experience of working-class young men in 1960s France.

Robinson's Place

The first, and more straightforward of the two, concerns two friends who are not letting their lack of cash get in the way of their attempts to chat up the filles de Paris. Settling their gaze on one in particular, they begin to woo her in tandem, until a rebuff sparks revenge. Shot in typical nouvelle vague style with unknown actors, the most striking thing about Robinson's Place is how much energy it has considering it is, for the most part, a study of ennui.

Eustache keeps his camera on the move for much of the film, walking with the three main characters as they wander the district looking for a place to grab a drink, the men operating as a 'charm-offensive' tag-team with the woman - at least in their minds.

Jean Eustache's second film - which, again, was intended to be screened as a double-bill with his first short film Robinson's Place under the title Bad Company - was largely made due to the success of that film, which proved a critical hit in 1963. Admired by the Cahiers du Cinema, his first film concerning the life of a couple of blue collar 'likely lads' on the outskirts of Paris also caught the attention of Jean-Luc Godard. In fact, the Breathless director was so impressed that he gave Eustache his leftover film stock from his newly completed Masculine Feminine.

The result is Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes which, thematically, pretty much picks up where Robinson's Place left off, again exploring the life and driving influences of a young man on the fringes of the city. Like many men of a certain age, Daniel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is less concerned with long-term goals and more preoccupied with getting enough cash in his pocket to buy a height-of-fashion duffel coat. This, in turn, will, he hopes, help him catch the attention of the local young women.

As with Robinson's Place, Eustache is interested not just in his central character and narrative but in documenting the sights and sounds of Paris. As Daniel swings into Santa action, Eustache watches from a distance, seemingly letting the people of Paris become unwitting bit-part players in his film, as they stop to have their pictures taken. Again, there is a deep sense of ennui and hopelessness, and an obsession with documenting the only things that can sometimes make life bearable, even if superficial.

These translations were made by and for Spectacle.