Jean Eustache, cult French filmmaker, comes to TIFF Cinematheque

Jean-Luc Godard once opined that the only things you need to make a movie were “a girl and a gun.” For his compatriot Jean Eustache, the gun was superfluous. In his cinema, words themselves could be turned into weapons; the dialogue cut so deep it drew blood.

Few filmmakers opened up as fully as Eustache, who was an enigmatic figure in the world of French cinema. However, the mysteriousness of the director’s personality belied the transparency of his filmmaking; 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 a car accident—the venerable film critic Serge Daney called Eustache’s cinema “mercilessly personal” . It was a succinct way of saying he had nothing to hide.

The irony is that a director who put all of himself on screen – with a few key exceptions – was hard to see in North America. Fortunately the new retrospective of shorts and feature films arrives at TIFF Cinematheque on July 7 is comprehensive and gives audiences a chance to catch up on Eustache’s slim but glowing lineup of films.

Eustache’s early documentaries, produced in the shadows of the New Wave under the direction of Godard and François Truffaut, contain elements of autobiography filtered through a precise sense of place. “La Rosière de Pessac” (1968) describes a religious ritual in Pessac, Eustache’s birthplace, by which the community celebrates its most “virtuous” female resident, a local form of canonization. The movie is satirical but never mean; instead of beating down his pious compatriots, Eustache observes their sweetly contradictory values ​​from a wry, sympathetic distance.

That space would be collapsed in 1973’s ferocious “The Mother and the Whore,” easily Eustache’s most famous film and the one in which his gift for intimacy borders on claustrophobia. Beginning with the title’s dialectical misogynistics—a riff on Sigmund Freud’s theories of the male need to defame or identify women—and stretching over 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 get nowhere – a character study of a man who just talks and takes no action.

The great orator in question is Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who talkatively holds court in various Parisian cafes in the aftermath of May ’68 while juggling lovers. 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), then try to live with them in a ménage à trois, is a veil for his ideological impotence.

The story, as it is, unfolds amid tempestuous deluges of dialogue ranging from bombastic monologues to whispered asides, all punctuated by a series of snarling swear words equal to anything in Scorsese or Tarantino. There is no small talk in the Eustache cinema; each exchange is packed with meaning, whether for the characters, the audience, or both. “I speak of dreams,” says Veronika in a rare moment when her lover gives her a word. “You talk about my nightmares.” It’s the perfect rebuke to a man who is simultaneously trying to speak about and through others.

There are some extremely awkward (and visceral) moments in “The Mother and the Whore,” including a sequence involving a tampon; the film was booed at Cannes on its way to winning the festival’s prestigious Grand Prix. The same polarizing ambivalence that made Eustache’s pathologically talkative breakthrough hard to love also turned it into a conversation piece and yet, despite its success, the filmmaker would only write and direct one more feature: 1974’s “Mes Petites Amoureuses” (“My Little Loves” ), an unusually melancholic coming-of-age fable inspired by the filmmaker’s own adolescence.

“Mes Petites Amoureuses,” named after a poem by Arthur Rimbaud, opens outside Bordeaux in 1950, where young Daniel (Martin Loeb) lives in a state of dreamy, idyllic anticipation; he is a bright student who loves to read and go to the movies and starts to notice local girls. After being uprooted to live with his mother and her new partner in the busier city of Narbonne, he experiences a turnaround: instead of a formal education, he receives training in motorcycle repair and bad romance.

A little life experience goes a long way: “My professor had nothing to do with passion,” he recalls, suddenly wise for his age—or at least that’s how he wants to sound.

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

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

His most fascinating exercise in dualism, however, was 1977’s two-volume Une Sale Histoire, which literally tells the same story twice. The first part sees the great Anglo-French actor Michael Lonsdale courting a group of friends who have arrived to hear a “dirty story” about a Parisian restaurant with peepholes in the men’s toilets; in the second, Eustache’s friend Jean-Noël Picq is shown to be 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 salaciousness of the material is at the same time beside the point and crucial to the film’s design and impact: despite no more than two men talking for 50 minutes, the film received an X rating from the French censorship , which showed, like “The Mother and the Whore” before it, that Eustache was truly masterful when it came to language.

The pleasure of the TIFF Cinematheque retrospective is twofold: these films are not only great, but their boldness and intricacy give us something to talk about.

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