Perhaps the most prestigious film festival on the planet has a not so secret reputation for rowdy audience behavior. If the crowd doesn’t like a film at the Cannes Film Festival, get ready for a chorus of boos—or at least that was the case for most of the festival’s storied history. Dozens of films have been heckled, walked out of, or even protested, but this trend seems to have cooled off in recent years in favor of coverage for the length of standing ovations. In this series presented and programmed by FilmScene and the Bijou Film Board, we take a look back at the films that audiences and critics wrongfully raked over the coals, reevaluating misunderstood masterpieces and cult classics. So take a second (or first) look with the power of hindsight and decide for yourself if you’ll jeer or cheer.

After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May ’68 came The Mother and the Whore, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache that captured a disillusioned generation navigating the post-idealism of the 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless, Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a dalliance with the younger, sexually liberated Veronika (Françoise Lebrun, Eustache’s own former lover), leading to a volatile open relationship marked by everyday emotional violence and subtle but catastrophic shifts in power dynamics. Transmitting his own sex life to the screen with a startling immediacy, Eustache achieves an intimacy so deep it cuts.