Jean Eustache, whose works captured so much of the energy and ambivalence of youth, died in 1981 at the age of 43. He was, as Molly Haskell writes, "the doomed Baudelairian poet of the cinema" and The Mother and the Whore, his chef d'oeuvre, was "personal cinema at its most radically confessional." Set in Paris, this is the mammoth account of three castaways from the sixties and the sexual revolution. Jean-Pierre Léaud is a perpetually unattached cafe 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, 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, and sex as a language. The talk is funny, sad, scatological, monological, confessional, philosophical, electric, and essential.