Originally released in 1973 and reissued last year in honor of its 25th anniversary, cinematic martyr Jean Eustache's The Mother And The Whore tells the story of a homeless, pseudo-intellectual layabout—New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud, the alter egos of both François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard in such films as 400 Blows and Masculin Feminin—who spends his days drinking, reading in cafés, and hitting on women in the street. His bourgeois, maternal live-in girlfriend (Bernadette Lafont) tolerates his laziness and womanizing until he begins to pursue a fatalistic, hard-drinking nurse (Françoise Lebrun) who's as blunt and practical as Léaud is pretentious and long-winded. The Mother And The Whore has no plot to speak of; though it lasts nearly four hours, nothing gets resolved, no one is changed, no lessons are learned, and, if anything, things end more ambiguously than they began. Yet the film's brilliance lies in its reluctance to pass judgment on its characters, put them through some sort of arbitrary plot, or make them hit their marks. As in the best films of John Cassavetes, The Mother And The Whore transcends the medium of film altogether and appears to capture life as it is lived, in all its messy, painful, infinite sadness. Eustache's film has the same basic set-up as James Toback's recent Two Girls And A Guy: Both revolve around narcissistic, hyper-literate, almost effeminately beautiful womanizers who struggle to come to terms with the women in their lives, and both films feature extraordinarily long takes and recurring musical motifs. But that's where the resemblance ends. The Mother And The Whore is to Two Girls And A Guy what Frank Sinatra is to Harry Connick Jr., or what Woody Allen is to Nora Ephron: Toback's film is as superficial as Eustache's is corrosive and profound. Toback reels in his actors whenever anything in Two Girls gets too intense, but Eustache keeps his camera rolling well past the point of comfort, achieving an almost painful level of intimacy. And while Robert Downey Jr. gave a good, albeit a bit shallow, performance in Toback's film, Léaud and Lebrun give two of the most intense, gut-wrenchingly honest performances this side of Cassavetes. Shot in black-and-white after it stopped being fashionable, The Mother And The Whore is generally considered the last film of the New Wave, which is appropriate: Eustache's film is as emotionally apocalyptic as Godard's similarly fatalistic Weekend is literally apocalyptic.