"[7] Though not a member of the Nouvelle vague, Eustache maintained ties to it, appearing as an actor in Jean-Luc Godard's Week End[citation needed] and editing Luc Moullet's Une aventure de Billy le Kid,[citation needed] which starred Jean-Pierre Léaud (the lead in Eustache's The Mother and the Whore).

[10] Besides his fictional shorts and features, Eustache made numerous documentaries, including several shot in his hometown of Pessac, and a feature-length interview with his grandmother.

The film's central three-way romance plot focuses on Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), his girlfriend Marie (Bernadette Lafont) and the nurse he meets and falls in love with, Veronika (Françoise Lebrun).

Yes, I'd heard that it was a classic of French cinema, but I wasn't exactly thrilled at catching an early-morning screening of a three-hour-and-thirty-five-minute black-and-white foreign-language film that reportedly consisted of little more than people sitting around and talking.

[citation needed] Shot in color by cinematographer Nestor Almendros (as opposed to The Mother and the Whore's grainy black-and-white), the film also features significantly less dialogue and focuses on teenage characters in a rural setting.

Regarding the tendency to re-examine in Eustache's work, the American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote: "An obsessive-compulsive filmmaker and clearly a tormented one who wound up dying by his own hand, Eustache was clearly experimenting with his variations as well as goading viewers into examining their own reactions to them".