The idea that there is one Woman, and she is mother, saint, and whore and her name is Mary, runs through the films in our Sacred and Profane series. Often, it is expressed as an aside, the equivalent of a stage whisper, and we want to say, "What's that? Speak up!" Jean Eustache's masterpiece The Mother and the Whore speaks up. Set in Paris, this is the mammoth account of three not-so-young castaways from the sixties and the sexual revolution. Jean-Pierre Léaud is at the center of the maelstrom for nearly the entire 210 minutes as a perpetually unattached café denizen who waffles between two women-his girlfriend, with whom he lives, and a free-and-easy nurse whom he brings home. And he dangles between two conceptions of Woman, the mother and the whore; it is his particular cross, so to speak, although Eustache hardly deifies him. Rather, the film makes an important statement on sexism and is not afraid to implicate itself in all the questions and condemnations that this evokes. Like My Night at Maud's, this is a film about language-sex, too, of course, but sex as a language. The talk is fascinating, funny, sad, scatological, monological, confessional, conversational, philosophical, electric, and essential.