The Mother and the Whore is made from inside the state of mind that is thought of as Village or Berkeley-graduate-school or, as in this case, Left Bank. It's about the attitudes of educated people who use their education as a way of making contact with each other rather than with the larger world. Their manner of dress and behavior is a set of signals: they're telling each other that they're illusionless. Their way of life is a group courtship rite, though the court each other not in order to find someone to love but in order to be loved - that is, admired. They live in an atmosphere of apocalyptic narcissism. [...] The hero, Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud), is a thirty-year-old puppy; in his milieu the less you do the cooler they appear. Alexandre has the glib, attitudinizing male-intellectual vanity that is the educated bum's form of machismo. [...] He's an amusing put-up artist, with no visible convictions or depth of feeling. When he sees an old girl friend who's abut to be married (Isabelle Weingarten), he makes a declaration of undying passion merely for the pleasure of hearing himself sound passionate. [...]

All his energy goes into his poses and paradoxes, and the strategies of coolness.[...]

Alexandre (and the graduate-school little bohemias of the world are full of Alexandres, though generally sponge off their parents as well as friends and girl friends) is, in fact, a spoiled infant-pimp, who lives off Marie and doesn't even provide a pimp's protection. He has nothing to offer but his taste, his classy prattle, and some body warmth. He considers that his presence - when he's around - is gift enough. [...] Alexandre is onscreen throughout, reacting to the women, cajoling them, trying on attitudes -so infatuated with his own pranks he hardly cares what effect they have on others [...]

Pauline Kael: The Mother and the Whore. The Used Madonna. New Yorker, March 4, 1974.