More than a few of the critics and cineastes who write about The Mother and the Whore struggle to reconcile the movie’s power and allure with its “reactionary” politics and bleak view of a world in which sexual liberation has led to emptiness rather than fulfillment, and political dreams have washed back ashore to decay in the shriveling glare of individual shortcomings and social deadlock. Why retell it now? To be or not to be one of those fools Eustache wants to toy with, choking on unpalatable opinions expressed with dubious conviction? Should I decide once and for all whether this movie is a justified masterpiece to be redeemed for our age, or a relic of a sad era and a somehow inadequate creator? I am holding on, so far, to the twists and turns in the story of these people who are ambivalent about each other but also determined, as their maker said, to “try to destroy each other.” I’m ambivalent about them, too. They can’t figure out how to be together, and they fake or recall but can’t really find any lightness. I like lightness, too, I worry that it’s more necessary than we think, but I can’t often find it. Where does it disappear to? I’m aging, is that it? Or is everything about sex, the city, or the future really so grim? I suspect I’ll have to say, eventually, what a livable life might look like without this pretense to charm and romance that French movies sold us so well that we—can I say we?—hold them dearer than almost anything, which is to say we can’t imagine what our desire would look like stripped of their (chic, forever modern) garments. I’ll move, like a movie, to the next scene.