Jean Eustache, cult French filmmaker, hits TIFF Cinematheque

Jean-Luc Godard once famously opined that the only things you needed to make a movie were “a girl and a gun.” For his compatriot Jean Eustache, the gun was unnecessary. In his cinema, words themselves could become weaponized; the dialogue cut so deep as to draw blood.

Few filmmakers opened themselves up as fully as Eustache, who cut an enigmatic figure in the world of French cinema. The mysteriousness of the director’s persona belied the transparency of his filmmaking, however; in an obituary published after the director’s death in 1981 at the age of 42 — a suicide by gunshot after becoming partially immobilized in an automobile accident — the venerable film critic Serge Daney called Eustache’s cinema “mercilessly personal.” It was a concise way of saying that he had nothing to hide.

The irony is that a director who put everything of himself onscreen has been — with a few significant exceptions — hard to see in North America. Fortunately, the new retrospective of shorts and features arriving July 7 at TIFF Cinematheque is comprehensive, giving audiences a chance to catch up with Eustache’s slender but incandescent body of films.

Eustache’s early documentaries, produced in the shadow of the New Wave spearheaded by Godard and François Truffaut, contained elements of autobiography, filtered through a precise sense of place. “La Rosière de Pessac” (1968) chronicles a religious ritual in Eustache’s rural hometown of Pessac by which the community celebrates its most “virtuous” female resident, a local form of canonization. The film is satirical but never mean-spirited; instead of punching down at his pious countrymen, Eustache observes their sweetly contradictory values at a wry, sympathetic distance.

That space would be collapsed in 1973’s ferocious “The Mother and the Whore,” which is easily Eustache’s most famous movie and the one where his gift for intimacy borders on claustrophobia. Starting with the dialectic misogyny of its title — a riff on Sigmund Freud’s theories about the male need to either vilify or identify women — and extending through its nearly four-hour running time, Eustache’s first dramatic feature was intended as a provocation. It’s a movie whose (anti) hero pontificates in circles to avoid getting anywhere — a character study of a man who is all talk and no action.

The great orator in question is Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who’s shown loquaciously holding court at various Parisian cafés while juggling lovers in the aftermath of May ’68. The character’s voracious sexual appetite, which leads him to first dump his live-in girlfriend Marie (Bernadette Lafront) for Polish nurse Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), and then to try to live with them together in a ménage à trois, is a veil for his ideological impotence.

The story, such as it is, unfolds amidst stormy deluges of dialogue, ranging from bombastic monologues to whispered asides, all punctuated by a string of snarling profanities to equal anything in Scorsese or Tarantino. There is no small talk in Eustache’s cinema; every exchange is freighted with meaning, whether for the characters, the audience or both. “I speak of dreams,” says Veronika in a rare moment where her lover lets her get a word in edgewise. “You talk about my nightmares.” It’s the perfect rebuke to a man who tries simultaneously to speak over and through others.

There are some supremely uncomfortable (and visceral) moments in “The Mother and the Whore,” including a sequence featuring a tampon; the film was booed at Cannes en route to winning the festival’s prestigious Grand Prix. The same polarizing ambivalence that made Eustache’s pathologically chatty breakthrough tough to love also transformed it into a conversation piece and yet, despite its success, the filmmaker would only write and direct one more fictional feature: 1974’s “Mes Petites Amoureuses” (“My Little Loves”), an uncommonly melancholy coming-of-age fable inspired by the filmmaker’s own adolescence.

Named for a poem by Arthur Rimbaud, “Mes Petites Amoureuses” opens in 1950 outside of Bordeaux, where young Daniel (Martin Loeb) lives in a state of dreamy, idyllic expectation; he’s a bright student who loves reading and going to the cinema and is starting to notice local girls. After being uprooted to live with his mother and her new partner in the more bustling city of Narbonne, he experiences a reversal: in lieu of a formal education, he gets schooled in engine repair and bad romance.

A little life experience goes a long way: “my professor had no business talking about passion,” he recalls, suddenly wise beyond his years — or at least that’s how he wants to sound.

Where “The Mother and the Whore” is hyper-articulate, “Mes Petites Amoureuses” leaves certain things unsaid, narrating its protagonist’s loss of innocence (and gaining of perspective) through a series of subtle, glancing encounters.

The similarities between the small-scale social portraiture of “La Rosière de Pessac” and “Mes Petites Amoureuses” are clear enough. Repetition was one of Eustache’s hallmarks, to the point that he actually remade “La Rosière de Pessac” in 1979, using the 10-year gap to show the minor ways in which the community had changed as well as its general imperviousness to the passage of time.

His most fascinating exercise in dualism, though, was 1977’s two-part “Une Sale Histoire,” which literally tells the same story twice. In the first section, we see the great Anglo-French actor Michael Lonsdale holding court amongst a group of friends who’ve arrived to hear a “dirty story” about a Parisian restaurant with peepholes in the men’s bathroom; in the second, Eustache’s friend Jean-Noël Picq is shown seemingly repeating the anecdote, when in fact his version of events is the authentic first-person recollection.

The theme of “Une Sale Histoire” is performance and the differences — both perceptible and subliminal — between truth and fiction. The bawdiness of the material is at once beside the point and crucial to the film’s design and impact: despite showing nothing more than two men talking for 50 minutes, the film was given an X rating by French censors, showing, like “The Mother and the Whore” before it, that Eustache was truly masterful when it came to language.

The pleasure of TIFF Cinematheque’s retrospective is twofold: not only are these movies great but, in their boldness and intricacy, they give us something to talk about.

SHARE: