So this is a three-and-a-half hour slice-of-life movie about the relationships between three or four people, set in Paris after the cultural revolution of May 1968 (which I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know was a thing). It reminds me a lot of a kind of mumblecore thing, in that you have some very fallible people muddling through their lives and making (sometimes) good and (often) bad choices, and the movie seems to just sit there and passively observe without artifice. Which is an impressive artifice, in truth.

And if the movie were just about the female characters (who are more interesting and complex than the title — which translates as “The Mother and the Whore” — would lead you to think), it could definitely work. But the problem is that like 98% of the dialogue in the film is from its protagonist, who is a pretentious asshole shitbird dude. We first see him hunting down his ex, telling her how much he loves her, and asking her to marry him… but of course, she’s with someone else and has no interest in this, and he basically follows her around telling her how she should feel, and how she is a terrible person for not feeling what he wants her to feel, and how it’s his feelings that are important and she’s not thinking enough about those and she doesn’t really want to be with this guy, and so on. (Later, unsurprisingly, it turns out that over the course of their breakup, he hit her, about which he expresses zero remorse.)

After that, it’s a dialogue with a shitbird pretentious-ass friend of his, where they both talk about how smart they are, and how people are cows who never think, and just prattle on with such faux-sophisticated things that you want to punch them both. And then we move into the main part of the movie, focusing on the two women who (completely inexplicably) sorta-love him, and the complicated relationships they have with each other.

The movie knows he’s a terrible junk person, and one of the best scenes is when the two women talk about how he’s a pretentious twit, while he pretends to sleep, then puts on dramatic music and sulks in the corner. But still and all, almost every scene is him monologuing pretentiously to one of the women about his deep wisdom about life and love, while they just listen in silence. Which a) it’s impossible to believe that any actual grown adult woman would put up with that for more than like a minute and a half, and b) it’s kinda painful for a grown adult human of any gender to put up with that for 3.5 hours of movie time.

Despite some real virtues, this is impossible to recommend.