Format: Internet video on laptop.
Once upon a time, there was a womanizing chauvinist named Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud). He wakes up next to his partner Marie (Bernadette Lafont), sees the time, and quickly gets dressed and leaves. As it turns out, Marie is little more than a sex partner; his heart truly belongs to Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten). It’s Gilberte who he wants to marry despite his live-in sex partner, but Gilberte has her own boyfriend who has asked her to marry him. She leaves him hanging and goes off, not committing to her new beau or to Alexandre. Almost in retaliation, he picks up a girl named Veronika (Francoise Lebrun), and bluntly admits this to Marie.
Welcome to Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la Putain (The Mother and the Whore), a film that, were it better known, would be the template for hipsters the world over. There is something almost indescribably hipster about this film. Alexandre and his friend (Jacques Renard) are unemployed but still manage to find money to survive. They listen to unknown, vaguely disturbing music (the friend, for instance, is an aficionado of a German singer promoted by the Third Reich and evidently has a library of Nazi literature), steal a wheelchair because it’s a wheelchair, and otherwise do their best not to conform. Alexandre claims that his job is sitting in a café and reading. He also consistently wears two neckties at the same time, the ties bound together in a cross between a half-Windsor and an ascot. Christ, if he could somehow have an iPad and ride a fixie, he’d only need the handlebar moustache.
