An epic, impressionistic talkathon, Jean Eustache's 1973 new-wave landmark The Mother and the Whore explores the psychopathology of everyday love. Leaud is a womanizing loafer who spends his days at Left Bank cafes spinning his intellectual wheels. Lafont is the shopkeeper off of whom he sponges, and blank-faced Lebrun the loose nurse he's lately bedding. As the three talk and talk about sex, we're lulled into the rhythms of half-cracked conversations and absorbed by rawness of feeling. B+