This is Jean Eustache's mammoth account of three not-so-young people adrift in a sea of talk in Paris, castaways of the '60's and the sexual revolution. Jean-Pierre Leaud, at the center of the maelstrom for nearly the entire 215 minutes, delivers an awesome performance as an unattached cafe denizen who dangles between two women - his girlfriend and a free-and-easy nurse - and two conceptions of Woman, the mother and the whore. Eustache's film makes an important statement on sexism, and it is not afraid to implicate itself in that same sexism. But the central concern of the film is perhaps language, hour upon hour of talk - fascinating, funny, sad, scatological, monological, confessional, conversational, philosophical - talk so electric and essential that it makes one redefine one's notions of what constitutes “pure” cinema.