Jean Eustache came of age as a director in the aftermath of the French New Wave, and made La maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore) already disillusioned by the events of May ’68. Several years after the film’s 1973 release, he committed suicide. Matt Longabucco’s book-length essay reckons with Eustache’s document of political bitterness and romantic catastrophe from the standpoint of our own vexed present in which the unfulfilled legacies of the Left and the sexual revolution still haunt our hopes and darken our horizons.