Plot
The film focuses on three twenty-somethings in an unconventional love triangle in Paris during the summer of 1972. Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is an unemployed young man involved with both a live-in girlfriend Marie (Bernadette Lafont) and the Polish nurse Veronika (Françoise Lebrun). He had picked up Veronika at a café after an unsuccessful reconciliation with a former love, Gilberte (Isabelle Weingarten). With Veronika, he begins a desultory affair. Although Marie affirms her indifference to Alexandre's affairs, she quickly changes her mind when she sees how close he becomes to Veronika. This leads to a growing estrangement between her and Alexandre. The film focuses less on plot or narrative than on the confused and ambivalent life style of these three young people in post-May '68 Paris
Read more about this topic: The Mother And The Whore
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)