The announcement that the entire oeuvre of Jean Eustache was going to be restored was probably the most important cinephile news of 2022. Thanks to the French Film Festival, his two feature films, „La Maman et la Putain” (1973) and „Mes petites amoureuses” (1974), can be (re)discovered on the big screen in several Romanian cities. An obligatory experience. 

Daniel (Martin Loeb), who used to live with his grandmother, is almost forcefully taken away by his mother and brought in to live together with her and her concubine. From a small village to a faraway town – both of them calm and languid –, things change to the same degree to which they are free to remain just the same. With his follow-up to the cursed hit that had been La Maman et la Putain, Eustache persists in his sketching of a time-without-time, in which everything always goes on, endlessly, and this is both soothing and infernal – and not necessarily in this order.

For Mes petites amoureuses, Eustache trades in his funereal black in white for summery colors, the center of Paris for the lost “countryside” and his flawless verbiage for an economy of communication that is just as stubborn – but even so, he manages to deliver a film that is, if not identical, then its flawless reverse, its negative, the jacket whose lining had been La Maman et la Putain. Where does, then, this quasi-unanimous rejection of the film stem from? It’s not from a surface-devel dichotomy, but from a sense of embarrassment towards the almost banal sense of naturalness in which it was crafted.

In comparison to the desperate cry that preceded it, Mes petites amoureuses discovers a solar calmness that is almost Renoir-esque – Eustache’s central reference – in which he hopes to add in a few drops of perversity. One only needs to pay a little more attention in order to understand that, just like La Maman et la Putain, this film is perfectly rotten at its core – it’s only that it hides its sickly pulsations underneath nostalgic artifacts and childish chansonettes.

The problem is, then, that Mes petites amoureuses proves to be much too conventional, too inert. Even more so given that, if it is indeed attempting something, then that something is to corrupt the age to which we have attached all of our hopes in humanity. This pathology is tolerable in the case of avowedly peripheral works like La Maman et la Putain – in this case, it can even end up clothing itself in the cloak of a generational manifesto. But what to do when it could also, in theory, apply to a boy that is good and somewhat obedient, even, who falls prey – physiological surge and fatality – to the passion of hormones? An uncomfortable position for the spectator, who is asked to remain with this character – who is not, in any sense of the term, a hero – without abandoning him with contempt, even required to be aware that, somewhere along the line, they might share the same roots of Evil.

Half a century after the release of these films – and following a new puritan turn within society – we are more well-equipped to estimate the level of Eustache’s brazen revolt. There is nothing radical at play – only if we were to accept that radicalism is a simple forcing of a collectively accepted normality; in other words, no “bang-bangs”, masks, and hyper-signaling of the eccentric. Eustache is still present with us because, as he turns the intrusive, brutal, and oft immoral art of seduction into his main topic, he lands smack in the middle of a debate that shows no signs of stopping.

His films – like the remarkable Une sale histoire (1976) – are testaments of a torrid desire that defies reason and insults morality, collected by an eye which – as we easily may intuit – finds it impossible to take a clinical distance that would exonerate it from criticism. These are in no ways the films of a head boy – but they are ones of a liminal sensibility, which puts its skin on the line with every new gesture.

Let us go back to the boy in our film. At home, a spicy drama is waiting for him, along with a taciturn man that has no desire to miraculously turn into a kind-hearted savior. At work – because his family forces him to give up on his studies – there are a lot of adults waiting to give him lessons in morality. For someone like Maurice Pialat, who is usually genial in his role as a cynic that brings about a storm, this skinny young man is the perfect prey: he doesn’t even have to say anything. We can almost savor how, immediately and with a thinly veiled voluptuousness, Pialat instantly places him where he (falsely) thinks that he belongs: amongst the kids who “no longer listen to their parents” and so on. Pialat’s presence here – hotly cool – is a wink between two filmmakers for whom the truth about the human condition is necessarily accompanied by a cruel tearing apart of any illusions. It’s what makes them disagreeable and necessary.

In contrast to La Maman et la Putain – a nervous and feverish stream, thrown in front of the camera with a sense of urgency and inner turmoil –, Mes petites amoureuses is a long-dreamed-of, carefully constructed film. With its multiple fondus au noir that conclude its sequences in an almost academic fashion, with blank interpretations and an off-screen voice with a tone that is always equal, this is the most Bressonian film that wasn’t directed by Vresson (he would, however, direct Le diable probablement later on, an absolute masterpiece about the twists of youth). Still, Eustache is simultaneously more perverse – there is nothing idyllic about this youth – and more obsessed about repenting. Between two crises of anguish and drunkenness – see the informative book written by his collaborator, Luc Beraud, Au travail avec Eustache –, the filmmaker knows that this womanizer who gets tripped up by life in both of his films, the one who transforms from a meek kid into a self-ironic, Baudelarian dandy, is, of course, himself.

There is no gesture more pure and guilty for Eustache than the act of gazing. Cinema and life could once be brought together – for example, in the fifties, when the film is set – first of all because both entailed a constant exercise in what we now call the male gaze: a biased school of the gaze, always ready to promptly satisfy its desires.

Between the obscure theater and the hotness of midday there lies the always troubling correspondence of a female silhouette, that concentrates all attention. The advantage of the theater had to do with how, sometimes, the film canceled distance and offered an illustrative close-up. Ever since Truffaut, we know that, amid this delirious passion that was cinephilia, one could find the rotten core of erotomania. Between lucidity and wet dream, Mes petites amoureuses sketches a somber reverie of little daytime deviations, in which the voyeur child and the unscrupulous filmmakers, two degenerate avatars of visual adventure, can also be looked at. It’s the most terrifyingly enjoyable thing imaginable for one that transformed the eye into a subject of labor.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.