Murmur of the Heart

Murmur of the Heart_360P

The subject of consensual incest has been examined in only a few films, almost all negatively, which is understandable. Malle's film was controversial because it allegedly depicts a mother-son incestuous encounter in a positive light, but I'm wondering what film people have seen! Neither the film nor the sequence is sympathetic at all. The boy is intensely dis-likable, his brothers are sleazy, and mom is an undeveloped character. The controversial scene of incest occurs only near the end, and does not hang over the whole film, contrary to reputation. In the scene, mother and son snuggle and accidentally have sex. Only in the movies can people "accidentally" have sex! I remain puzzled by the film's glowing reputation all these years, and wonder if it is just because Louis Malle is one of those artists that people feel obligated to praise. You cannot make a beautiful, sympathetic movie with a story full of unsympathetic characters. Therefore, when people use words like "beautiful" and "moving" to describe the film. I am perplexed. Sorry, folks.

Great filmmaker, nauseating film - and not just because of its incestual content. It tells the story of a rich, entitled 14 year old who likes jazz, existential literature, and fantasizing about his mother. The boy is seriously repelling, speaking impudently to adults, treating waiters rudely, harassing the servants, and trying to force himself on girls. And he's the protagonist; Malle contrasts him to his older brothers who are even more obnoxious, as well as a snob with conservative political views. Kids say and do dumb things and I admire a film which tries to be honest about what they get up to while coming of age, but these kids are so spoiled as to be revolting, and it's troubling that Malle doesn't seem to be aware of it. He wants us to laugh along with their repugnant antics. Meanwhile, the mother (Lea Massari) knows no boundaries, which we see from the opening scene where she's playing around half-dressed with her sons. Malle builds the framework for what ultimately happens between them by having one of the characters referring to childhood no longer existing, and the mother admitting that she has no modesty. Unfortunately, while Massari's performance is pretty good, the boy's (Benoît Ferreux) is weak, lacking any kind of range and consisting mostly of a blank, serious stare. Aside from just how self-absorbed and unpleasant this family is - man, their laughter at the end was seriously grating - another problem is that Malle doesn't exercise any restraint at all in his script. The boy compares the length of his * with his brothers, guzzles bottles of expensive wine, visits a brothel, narrowly avoids being molested by a priest, masturbates to the crime novel "J'irai cracher sur vos tombes" with a cat placed between his legs, and spies on his mother having sex and bathing. When one girl turns him down in her hotel room, he tells her he'll go knock on another's door and does, and of course ends up successful. It's too much, and any kind of subtlety in the warmth between the mother and son is drowned out. The idea that they can just forget what happened and all be happy is ridiculous, and the fact that the film condones the cruelty to those in social classes lower than theirs is maddening. Overall, an unpleasant film with unlikeable characters.

In 1954, in the Spring, the fourteen year-old boy Laurent Chevalier (Benoît Ferreux) lives with his Italian mother Clara Chevalier (Lea Massari); his father, the gynecologist Charles Chevalier (Daniel Gélin); and his teenager brothers Thomas (Fabien Ferreux) and Marc (Marc Winocourt) in an upper-class neighborhood in Dijon. Laurent is fan of jazz, and Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie are his favorite musicians. He also likes to read Proust and other prominent writers. Laurent is very close to his mother and he discovers that she has a lover named Jacques. However, Charles ignores his younger son. Thomas and Marc take Laurent to a brothel but while having his first intercourse, he is interrupted by his drunken brothers. When the doctor finds that Laurent has a murmur in his heart, he suggests that the boy should go to Bourbon-les-Eaux to heal and Clara stays with him in the same room. Along the days, Laurent befriends the teenagers Helene (Jacqueline Chauvaud) and Daphne (Corinne Kersten); on the Bastille Day, Jacques dumps Clara and she celebrates the holiday with Laurent. They drink a lot and when they return to their room, they have an incestuous relationship. "Le Soufflé de Couer" is a coming of age story with Oedipus complex of a young boy in France in the 50's. The story of Louis Malle is politically incorrect in accordance with the present standards of Hollywood but absolutely acceptable in 1971, the year of "Summer of 42". The fourteen year-old boy has an incestuous relationship with his mother; is molested by a priest; smokes; drinks; shoplifts; has sex with prostitute; cheats; drives reckless on the road with his brothers, but all the situations are credible and developed very naturally. The sexual tension between Laurent and Clara is present from the beginning to the end and Lea Massari is extremely beautiful and sexy. The first half is quite pointless but the second half is a very provocative film. My vote is seven. Title (Brazil): "O Sopro do Coração" ("A Murmur in the Heart")

The best film by Louis Malle ( that's not saying much ) is a story about the awakening, sexual and otherwise, of a scampy 14-year old Parisian named Laurent Chevalier. He's a precocious teen, and lest we forget, someone is always ready to remind us -- each character sees the same Camus book laying around on his nightstand and says something like "You're a real intellectual!" One assumes Laurent, played with bandy-legged aplomb by Benoit Ferreux, represents Malle as he wishes he were at a younger age. Still, Murmur of the Heart gets a lot right when it comes to the depiction of a budding artist's development. Like most sensitive youths, Laurent is virtually estranged from his father ( who seems like an interloper in his own home ), and much prefers the company of his mother. But I'm afraid in this case "company" is a euphemism. Yes, Laurent gets a chance to revisit ye olde womb near the end of the movie. But Murmur of the Heart is not "about" incest, as its reputation would lead you to believe. It's an affectionate portrait of an unusually close mother/son relationship. They discuss her extramarital affairs, his schoolboy crushes, and The Story of O with complete openness and candor. They make an adorable couple. The sex is just a cherry on top, so to speak. One tiny problem for me was that Ferreux never truly seems RELATED to his mammacita, as played by Italian actress Lea Massari. This takes some of the sting out of their eventual coupling. We think, "Well, why not?" If the mother resembled Laurent even a little, maybe had his high cheekbones or pale skin... creepy! But there's just no way scrawny Laurent came out of that bodacious body. Still, this disparity shouldn't detract one iota from your enjoyment of Massari's warm presence. And hey -- if the casting is too cute to be convincing, at least it's not too cute to be cute. A much bigger problem, at least for modern audiences, will be the incest scene itself. Far too many movies have dealt with incest since this one -- notably Spanking the Monkey and The Celebration -- but to be fair, Malle was first. The hoary jokes about lesbians, gays, and gynecologists were also presumably more daring at the time. And the same goes for the soundtrack, which trots out jazz luminaries like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in such a way that virtually carbon dates the movie as "SWINGING PARIS 1971!" Malle was always modish to a fault. But he was never again to be as intimate and personal as he is here.

My intention is not to write a full review, but to propose a perspective on this film that seems overlooked. On one hand is the (not so) sophisticated art-house film lover who thinks this movie is a challenging French "coming of age" film. They view it as a comedy with likable, mischievous adolescents groping towards enlightened adulthood, and a warm, good-natured mother, with sparks of anarchic, libertine fun to break up the steady stream of philosophical musings of a prodigious (and therefore charismatic, obviously) adolescent protagonist, destined to be the next Sartre or Camus. On the other hand are the people who see the same thing, but are shocked and confused by things that strike them as, in fact, depraved and ugly. These latter people don't understand how, for example, a comedy could feature incest, and they wonder why they find it hard to like the characters. Both sides -- to me -- may have missed the point. To me, Malle's film is not at all a "comedy", but rather a psychological horror film. It's a study of "creepiness", and clearly a very unflattering (even hateful) portrait of provincial bourgeois French society. It's a film about creepy, damaged (bourgeois) people doing creepy, damaging things to themselves, to their domestic help (who are tellingly portrayed in a very positive light), and to each other. What I see is Malle's very obvious dislike for the protagonists in this movie. It's a film about awkward, unlikable, brutish, cruel, unfunny people, in all their glory. The kind of people that make you want to take a shower after spending just a few minutes with them. The protagonist son is awkward and ugly (in both style and physical appearance), brutish, and violent. Make no mistake: if you actually thought Malle was suggesting that mother-son incest could possibly be a sweet, tender moment between two healthy, happy people, or if you laughed when one of the arrogant, obnoxious children wantonly destroyed a Corot hanging on the wall, and if you perceived all of the violent, awkward treatment of the domestic help and women throughout the film as tender or comedic coming of age moments, then you really need to re-evaluate things. There's no way whatsoever that Malle intended any of the characters in this family to be anything other than detestable -- and it starts with the detestable mother, who damages everyone and everything she touches. So, for all the people who thought they were supposed to laugh throughout this film (but who wouldn't want to admit that it actually didn't feel genuine for fear of seeming less intellectual (how ironic!), and for all the people who were incensed at Malle for suggesting incest could be seen as anything other than physical and emotional violence, I think you may want to rethink what's at the heart of this film.

La Soufflé au Cour really manages to make you question well-established values. Made in 1971 I can really imagine how it deranged the society and made the French film censure think twice before allowing it to be published. As a provocative film there's no doubt it's still timely. Louis Malle breaks taboos with a spontaneity that makes me as a viewer question if I've missed something growing up. Malle seems to me to be above all a magnificent story-teller. There is no apparent message in La Soufflé au Cour, instead Malle let's the viewer make his own assumptions, based the deceptively realistic happenings and surroundings. It's an unforgettable film, but watch out. You might be influenced by it.

Touching coming-of-age story focuses on the youngest of three sons of a French gynecologist and his wife in Paris in the 1950s. Malle does a wonderful job of showing the relationships between the family members, helped by fine acting by all, particularly Massari as the beautiful mother and Ferreux as the gawky 15-year old son. As with Malle's "Pretty Baby," issues of sexuality are handled without hangups, even if it involves children. It is well known that one of the central themes of this film is incest but rather than being disturbing or exploitative, it is presented in a surprisingly tender manner without being judgmental.

Laurent is the youngest, smartest, most sensitive of three boys in a wild bourgeois French family. His brothers are amoral and hysterical. His father could not be more uptight. And his mother is full of laughter, beautiful and irresistible. The brothers drink, steal, and even replace a valuable original painting just so they can watch their father's reaction when they casually start cutting it to pieces during dinner. This is the ultimate French counterculture movie. Somehow the way Laurent pleases himself with books and bebop recordings is simultaneously sophisticated and innocent. The Charlie Parker score is mesmerizing. Some people won't get it. Others will find it evokes everything wonderful about growing up and discovering yourself.

Decades ago, David Mamet wrote a play called "Sexual Perversity In Chicago", the base for the later movie "About Last Night..." The play's title was a come-on; all it was was about two men and two women, each man trying to have a relationship with each woman, and when said relationships fail, both men try to have relationships with the other woman instead. They're not even swingers as such. This movie is quite the opposite! The box indicated that this is supposed to be a comic coming-of-age story. There are some laughs, but those are offset by the growing weirdness and creepiness. None of the characters provoke either interest or sympathy. The father is ridiculous; the mother is shallow and silly, the protagonist's two older brothers are aggressive, obnoxious, and unlikable; and the young teenage protagonist is hardly better than the rest of his family. He meets girls, but rather than try to charm them, he simply gropes them and makes them uncomfortable. The title refers to the illness the protagonist gets mid-movie, and he moves to a hotel for a rest cure, his mother accompanying him. We learn of the mother's strange background, which would have been a source of interest, but she is never developed. And finally, mother and son drink and hit upon each other, and, well...that explains my review title. I didn't wait to see what happened next. One can make the claim that sexual standards may be different in Europe, but not THAT different! I suspect only because the director was so prominent could he dare make this sort of story.