THE MOTHER and the Whore can be seen as a very reactionary film that condemns contraception, abortion, and the dissolution of traditional values in general. Director Jean Eustache may intend to drag us through a murky decadence that has lost touch with even a sense of style until all it has left is ennui, automatic sex and hyper-self-consciousness. According to this view, the burden of the film is carried by the long, emotional monologue of a woman named Veronika (Francois Lebrun) who tells us that "the only time sex isn't sordid is when two people want to have a child." In this vein, you could talk about The Mother and the Whore as if it were an ethical statement about "purification" or "self-knowledge." But the total effect of the film is to make this sort of thinking seem helplessly inadequate. Eustache gives you all the pieces to construct a moralizing interpretation of the film, but saps your will to put them all together.

Eustache really doesn't want to come to any conclusions about culture, sex, morality, cinema or any of the other issues his film deals with. Instead he offers a heightened awareness of how complicated they are without imposing a falsely simple pattern on them; he wants to give us things as they are and not as they can be structured by film-makers. In order to do this, however, he has had to make an unusually structured film, writing out every word of dialogue and thinking out each shot beforehand. Eustache's script repays careful attention even when it seems most banal, and his meaning gets denser as the film goes on.

Eustache is aware of the difficulties of making a three-and-a-half hour film that doesn't make a moral point or offer a strong emotional appeal. He is constantly teasing the audience about its desire for an easy way out. At one point Marie (Bernadette Lafont) quietly gets up and goes into the bathroom where she takes an overdose of sleeping pills, and Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Leaud) panics. When, later on, Alexandre himself gets up and goes to the medicine cabinet, you expect him to do something equally dramatic--to slash his wrists, for example. Instead he sprays his face with cologne.

At one point, Veronika turns towards the audience and says, "In a bad film, that is what would be called the message." The implication is that only bad films have messages. Eustache made his film bulletproof against interpretation; it succeeds in finally smothering the impulse to find a pattern, while giving us just enough on the surface--of profanity, wit, and nudity--to keep our interest. There is an air of parody about parts of the film--Alexandre, for example, dresses precisely like Eustache himself. In the middle of her tearful confessional Veronika rises from the floor and slyly mocks her own self-dramatizing instincts. "With that," she interrupts herself, "Veronika poured herself another Pernod." Eustache's self-consciousness is so extreme that it is difficult to tell where his irony stops and his sincerity begins. The safest course is to assume that there is no statement in the film that is not a pseudo-statement, nothing that escapes Eustache's subversive ambiguity.

THE FILM'S FALSE ending shows this ambiguity best: After Veronika's monologue, Alexandre leaves to drive her home; and Marie is left alone, lying on her bed, her head against the wall. She puts on a song by Marlene Dietrich and when the song is over the audience expects the film to be over: Veronika has just delivered a devastating judgment about the lives of Alexandre and Marie; she seems determined to walk out of their lives. Instead, Eustache returns to Alexandre and Veronika and the audience titters in annoyance that the film isn't finished yet, that an easy, obvious ending has been taken away from them. A couple of minutes later, Alexandre extracts a promise of marriage from Veronika while she laughs hysterically. The film's last image is nearly indecipherable: The camera lingers on Alexandre as he relaxes with his back against a refrigerator--a relaxation that could mean either relapse into his old life now that the emotional crisis is over, or a feeling that the emotional crisis is over, or a feeling that he really found a way out.

The bulk of the film portrays that old life with Marie and Veronika and blocks all avenues of escape. The three characters live almost entirely at night, inside the same two or three rooms and the same two or three cafes, imprisoned by the motifs of their decadence: whisky, cigarettes, Proust, Dietrich. Any attempt to get out of this claustrophobic world, like marriage, seems like just another manipulation of unreality. The only thing that makes the acceptance of marriage seem so important is that it is discussed at the end of the film, but Eustache has built The Mother and the Whore so that what happens at the end should be no more important than what happens near the beginning.

The beginning of the film resembles a comedy of manners and its humor persists to the end. Eustache has written a very funny movie, but what starts out as the foolishness of his characters turns out to be something worth watching for more than laughs. If it seems like slow going some of the time, that's partly because Eustache shot the film slightly fast, so that the action appears in barely noticeable slow motion. But an even more important kind of slowness in the film is the deliberateness with which it digests its characters.

Because he has given himself so much time, Eustache can do things much more subtly than he could have in a feature-length film. So many conceptual avant-garde movies have burdened us with their length--like Andy Warhol's eight hours of the Empire State building--that we are accustomed to associate subtlety with economy. But nothing in The Mother and the Whore is superfluous, and sometimes the long stretch of time allows for effects impossible in shorter films. By the time Alexandre brushes past his ex-lover Gilberte in the supermarket, for example, we have forgotten her completely, and so we experience the same double-take shock of recognition that he does. Eustache's characters have lost the knack of establishing decent relationships with each other, but he needs time to work through to failure all their varying attempts. By the time we have spent three and a half hours with Alexandre and Veronika we know that a marriage between them would be an impossible joke; after only an hour and a half, though, we might have been able to accept such an event as a "character reversal."

You can leave The Mother and the Whore disappointed, but realize a few days later it is still unfolding as you think about it. It's always undercutting itself, being generally obstreperous, mocking any intention to take it seriously. The last line is "I don't like to be watched while I'm vomiting"--a slap in the face to an audience that still half-expects a dance of death silhouetted across a mountain-top at the end of a talky black and white film. But if you see the film without preconceptions or a burning need to analyze, and stick it out to the bitter end, The Mother and the Whore can be everything Last Tango in Paris was supposed to be and wasn't--a masterpiece about our enslavement to sex, boredom, and film, worth every one of its 215 minutes.