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It's high comedy. It's French bourgeois lifestyle. Louis Malle's delicate style of working with taboo subject matter reached a personal plateau with a dysfunctional household in "Murmur of the Heart", an early reach back into his own garden of memories and familial idiosyncrasies that he has stringently plucked from over the years. He approaches it with an innocent intent, cheeky, but still innocent nonetheless. Through the nostalgic and mean-spirited jibes at the domestic help, clergy and stiff-lipped crust of high society, it commences on a journey of an adolescent male, Laurent Chevalier (Benoit Ferreux) in Dijon, France circa 1954. He longs to break free to that stage of enlightened adulthood that seems just within reach but yet so very far. But within its pith, it's the very antithesis of melodrama. Taking on its inviolable subject matter's horns with both hands, it wrangles it to the ground while giving us something to think about. It's definitely not about exorcising ghosts of the past but to let them regale us with stories of unforgettable youth.

After 35 years, "Murmur of the Heart" still rings truer and closer to home than most contemporary comedies (and even dramas) revolving around the "coming of age" and "sexual awakening" in a young teen. It's also more daring and liberal in its construction of key family members being part of that very natural formation of sexual DNA and identity. They discuss philosophy. They discuss suicide. They discuss "The Story of O". Laurent and his 2 older brothers consort in disrespectfully petty behaviour contrary to what their upbringing holds sacred. Laurent's a top student, an intellectual that sees the world around him as a playground. It's a smalltime superiority complex as he defines his sensitive sensibilities with discernment beyond his years and a haughty disregard for divergent thoughts with a self-important air.

Revolving primarily about Laurent and his mother, Clara ("L' avventura's" Lea Massari), it's a refreshing look at a parental relationship based around adoration and fondness (coming under constant mocking by his brothers) than the contemporaneous and contemptuous notion of disdain and rebelliousness surrounding the authority figures and generational gaps. It underlines the idiom of a mother being her son's first love. In its essence, it encapsulates many complicated mother-child relationships including the emotional Oedipal issues that do crop up. And through that, a lovely parallelism is wrought with its interpretation of a woman who wants to be a girl and a boy who wants to be a man.

Conforming to an almost sitcom style, its self-dependent, autonomous scenes and situations just about start to border on farcical proportions. Its characters place sex and carnality high up on a pedestal, while Malle condescendingly films it as something so pedestrian and run-of-the-mill, not worth the hype and excitement over it anyway. He makes the patient, inevitable buildup to a key sex scene that had caused controversy when it was first released, to seem more natural and accepting than he does the sexual encounters that actually do seem the norm in society.

Louis Malle perhaps has directed his most controversial film about Laurent and his complicated relationship with his mother. Because he is the youngest of three boys, he is still a virgin and coddled like the family baby. The film seems to last forever but in a beautiful moving way. We watch as his beautiful Italian vivacious mother seems to attract admirers even her own son. Without discussing the film's oedipal issues, the film has some very pleasant scenes and some that are not so pleasant. Maybe Malle is trying to bring reality of a young body's sexuality. His two older brothers are not the sympathetic or kind older brothers to him especially. Laurent is truly the film's most important character but his mother is definitely the most important figure in his life. As he comes of age, she has to grasp with losing him to another woman, the inevitable outcome of any mother-son relationship. We learn a lot about Laurent's mother too in this film. While sexuality is another theme in this classic film, there are touching scenes between the Laurent and his mother. As he finds himself attracted to other women, he becomes daring, insulting and even unlikable. I won't give away the ending of this film. But it's worth watching even today more than 30 years later, I cannot believe it's older than me. It seems like it could have been done today and that's why it's a classic film.

Only Louis Malle could take such a delicate subject and create cinematic charm and humor. Malle frequently used events from his own youth as inspiration for his fascinating coming-of-age films. Murmur Of The Heart is an excellent example of the unique allurement of French cinema.

I wonder what Freudians would think of the relationship between Laurent (Benoit Ferreux) and Clara Chevalier (Lea Massari), son and mother, who for half the film are basically on their own as the son gets treatment for a heart ailment. Maybe it's hard to think anything about this, or to put such an easy label as 'oedipal' on this whole psychological criss-cross. But what's hard to deny is how much liveliness is in possibly Louis Malle's best film (that I've seen yet at any rate). It's a tale of innocence lost, but then again in a family where it's not a high commodity anyway. Laurent is surrounded by older brothers who get him into parties with alcohol, and even to a brothel where he awkwardly loses his virginity. He also is a choirboy, does excellently in school, has an intellectual side that runs deep, and goes to confess his sins (from time to time) for the priest. But then there's something about his Mother, when he sees her get into a car he doesn't recognize or rides off with someone mysterious, that ignites his confused flame of first-hitting-puberty sexual jealousy. And it all leads up to Bastille day.

Murmur of the Heart is not a picture really bent on anything with a solid plot, as it's more concerned with the kind of European 'character study' (not that there isn't a story there to look at it). I read Ebert's review and he mentioned that the picture is more about the mother than the son. I could see where that viewpoint comes from, but I have to think that it's more about both of them, and while I watched it (as opposed to now thinking about it once its ended) it seemed more concerned with the son and perpetually through his point of view. He doesn't totally understand why his mother feels the way she does, and why she runs off to her other man, torn between leaving her gynecologist husband for him. But Malle makes it seem torn between each side when Laurent is left at the hotel while Clara is away for two days. His confusion leads him into a kind of disarray that's been hinted at before, and its made all the more clear in the tension- very underneath their games and witty remarks- that builds up.

But even with such an idea for the film, it is never really ugly or trashy. If anything, Malle does the best thing possible by making such a taboo subject realistic around the situation of family and the period. It's really wonderful seeing how Malle directs the smaller scenes, the bits that a director usually wouldn't bother with for emotional sake, or the little bits of dialog that do go on in the real world that don't necessarily have to do much with the rest of the story (one of those is when Laurent is getting washed down with a hose at the medical clinic, and the woman washing him goes on a long tangent of talk, not conversationally, just to hear herself talk). It could be tricky dealing with such mundane aspects of life such as brothers hanging out and goofing off, but there's layers of masculinity that get thrown in the mix (what are we to make of when the boys measure 'themselves' with a ruler, much to the angry housekeeper's dismay, or when Laurent tries out her mothers make-up I wondered).

All the while Malle bases these characters in an entirely plausible environment and with a cast that works very well. Massari is almost TOO alluring a woman to be anyone's mother, least of which the headstrong and vulnerable Laurent, but this works to show what her frame of mind must be too, as she gets as much attention (in a different way of course) as Laurent does from the teenage girls. The actor playing Laurent is a first-timer here ala Leaud in 400 Blows, but I even got a Bresson feeling from him, of there being a lot of emotions buried underneath his usually calm and poised expression, the kind that can be felt even with just the slightest hints. He's perfect for the kind of kid who's still a bit much in his own desires and wants to see what may happen from all of this in the long term. But the psychological implications are left even more to chance by the ending, which is one of the best moments Malle has ever directed as the family all laughs together. Not to forget to mention another big plus, the film is filled with one of the best jazz soundtracks ever put together (including Parker, Bechet, Gillespie among others), and an exquisite use of period and very tasteful way about the more 'graphic' parts of the film. Murmur of the Heart shows in tragic-comic detail the sophistication and lewd sides of the French, and draws a lot to ponder about a boy's crossover in that rotten period of 14-15 years old and of a woman who has the same mixture of unstable emotions and child-like ideals of her own blood that pull the two into what happens. In totally unconventional terms, it's 'magnifique'. A+

This is one of my all-time favorite films.

Young Laurent Chevalier, his mother & his roguish elder brothers break every taboo known to small-town 1950s Dijon: underage drinking, underage sex, blasphemy, incest, petty theft, adultery, art forgery, whoremongering, drunk driving... What more can you ask? Malle treats their escapades with such lighthearted sympathy & wit you can't help liking them.

Before I first saw Soufflé au Coeur, I read a blurb for it in the monthly listings of my local repertory cinema that ran something like this (I quote from memory): "This film does a lot to restore the French to their former reputation for sophisticated naughtiness." I can't sum it up any better than that.

'Murmur of the Heart' is an experience that sneaks up on you like the combined years of one's youth. The subject matter is what the repressed might reductively characterize as simple incest. That is NOT what this film is about. It is about the elastic moment of adolescence. The strange, ugly, and beautiful contradictions of familial intimacy. A boy deperate to taste the pleasures of being a man - while stuck in an awkward inbetween physical, and pyschic geography. This is one of the strongest films in all of French cinema.

Only in France would an otherwise typical coming-of-age comedy lead up to a tender moment of incest, and perhaps only Louis Malle could have filmed it with such grace, tact, and good humor. The director's adolescent alter-ego is a gangly, jazz-happy son of a wealthy gynecologist, teased by his two older brothers, coddled by his cosmopolitan young mother, and suspicious of his father confessor's less than spiritual attentions. The discovery of a heart murmur sends him and his mother to a distant spa, where fate and nature conspire toward a fleeting indiscretion. But because Malle takes the time to establish his characters, and does so with such obvious affection, the moment is not as racy or obscene as it sounds. Curiously, the young hero's growing pains are also linked to his country's problems in Indochina, so is it any wonder, with the adult world in such turmoil, that a boy would rebel against the conventional wisdom of his elders?

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.

There have been a million coming of age stories in the history of the world, most of them probably in the film medium. What a pathetic thing to have to endure something as trite as the American film American Pie when something like The 400 Blows exists. Murmur of the Heart will remind most of that classic, and, akin to French films such as Zero for Conduct, The 400 Blows, and Malle's own Au Revoir Les Enfantes, it is excellently acted, both by the adults in the film and the children (here, though, they're teens), and it is infinitely more truthful than most American films of the same genre. Murmur of the Heart falls just short of The 400 Blows, but it is a worthy successor to it. Beware, though. This film's main theme is sexuality, and there are some very disturbing scenes, even thought the mood of the film is quite light-hearted. 9/10

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.

Seven years before PRETTY BABY (1978), Malle directed another controversial film about the sexual awakening of a precocious teenager - in this case, a boy. As with the later film, Malle's elegant handling - suffused with feeling and humor, even irreverence - brings no portentous message and certainly no sensationalism to this theme (which culminates in an incestuous relationship between the boy and his attractive, middle-aged mother!). Even so, the complicity that goes on here between the boy and select members of his family seems to me to be wishful thinking on Malle's part (who also wrote the script) more than anything else: the boy's sexual initiation is organized by his promiscuous elder brothers and, apart from the mother-son "liaison" - which happens when she's intoxicated and is, in any case, shot in the dark and quite sensitively handled by all concerned - he's compliant of her various affairs, which actually brings him to confess to her that he never loved his father and consequently doubts his own parentage!

The acting by the entire cast - veterans and newcomers alike - is wonderful; still, watching professionals like Lea Massari (in perhaps her most important role apart from the girl who goes missing in Antonioni's L¡¦AVVENTURA [1960]), Daniel Gelin (who has aged quite a bit from his 50s heyday!), Michel Lonsdale (as a potentially paedophile priest!) and Ave Ninchi (as the children's long-suffering, heavy-set Italian maid) is especially gratifying. The score by several jazz performers, including Charlie Parker, provides perfect accompaniment to the film.

The only extra on the stand-alone Criterion release (it's also available as part of a 4-Disc Set with two other Malle films which revolve around children - LACOMBE LUCIEN [1974] and AU REVOIR, LES ENFANTS [1987]) - is the film's theatrical trailer which, amusingly, manages to incorporate in its publicity several of the most famous titles of the French New Wave!

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.

You'll love watching this film with your mother as the film goes deep into the mother son relationship and the film will make you question and deeply think about what you should and shouldn't be doing with your mother. I highly recommend this film to young men like myself to watch it with their mother, my mum loves me even more as a sweet result of watching this very sexy movie and my sperm cry out for some soothing motherly affection every time I watch this masterpiece of a movie. I was a bit disappointed with the sex scene at the end though, I the ending sex video would be more like an adult sex video but this film is still totally worth watching.

Malle's semi autobiographical film is consistently watchable and entertaining. Nakedly honest in it's portrayal of adolescent life. Would probably be shocking, even to modern American audiences. Done with great artistic flair, and very French. Oh la la.

Essentially light but ultimately rather heavy domestic drama involving an overly motherly mother and a child pushed this way and that by her and his two older brothers. The early scenes in the rich folks household, I assume, are intended to be amusing but looked at today the bullying of servants looks pretty shameful especially with the ongoing background news of French involvement in 'Indo China'. On the other hand the film skips along very nicely and although not a lot happens at first, the film is very well shot and we are always aware that something is going to happen. We also have a good idea what that something might be as mother and child continue their social intimacies. The sexy mum is played by Lea Massari who was the girl who went missing in L'Avventura ten years before and she performs well here, as does the young lad, who seems to be able to do no wrong, played by Benoit Ferreux. Never quite as light and fluffy as one might imagine the denouement, nevertheless, must have stunned audiences back in the day.

'Loosely' based on aspects of his own adolescence this is Louis Malle's eighth feature although he refers to it as 'my first film'. Hard to believe that this is in fact the first that he has written on his own. One of Malle's strengths is his sense of place and period and we are totally convinced that we are in France of the 1950's. He has created a wonderful portrait of a bourgeois family comprising Charles, a gynaecologist, his Italian wife Clara and three sons, the youngest of whom, Laurent, is particularly close to his mother. It is such a pity that the film acquired the title 'Dearest Love' as the original title 'Murmur of the Heart' not only refers to Laurent's medical condition but also subtly alludes to his feelings for his mother. These feelings lead to an act of incest which is beautifully directed by Malle and seems a perfectly natural development in their relationship. This is certainly Malle's most joyous film and he has drawn the best from his cast. Clara's character is written as an irresistible free spirit and is played to perfection by Lea Massari. Benoit Ferreux is just right as the adolescent whose hormones insist on throwing their weight about and the excellent Daniel Gelin makes the most of a rather dour role as Charles. Michel Lonsdale does a marvellous turn as a touchy-feely Catholic priest! It is nigh on impossible not to be enchanted by this film which serves as a reminder that incest should be kept in the family!

I really liked the first part of the movie, it felt like another really great coming of age story from Malle but then the second part of the movie came up and it really shocked me. It was unpleasant to watch and almost terrifying to watch, also our lead character becomes unlikeable which made it even harder for me to keep watching it. I wish I enjoyed it more, maybe it will get better on rewatch.

How can one not immediately fall in love with this film? From the very beginning there's not one aspect that doesn't impress. Having Charlie Parker greet our ears from the start is a real treat, and Louis Malle's reliably masterful, vibrant direction pairs neatly with Ricardo Aronovich's crisp cinematography. The filming locations, production design, and art direction are all neatly fetching; the whole cast readily make a mark with excellent, spirited performances that are nonetheless natural and fluid. And as if it were possible Malle's screenplay is even more engrossing in no time at all, a coming of age tale that's a little warped even by some of the standards of the genre. The man is consistently admirable as a filmmaker, and still 'Murmur of the heart' somehow surprises for just how entertaining and satisfying it is right out of the gate.

Equal parts comedy and drama, the characters, scene writing, and dialogue all overflow with peculiar, zesty, and sometimes downright bewildering energy and personality as they build the narrative. The Chevalier household is filled with curious dynamics, not least two impossibly boorish older brothers to protagonist Laurent, who himself is almost as rude as he is smart. Add in mother Clara, with whom Laurent shares an astoundingly co-dependent, open relationship, and the stage is set for a coming of age story like few others. Every other supporting character to enter the tableau in some way only accentuates the complexities between precocious son and free-spirited mother - until that moment comes when the feature culminates in the exact fashion we've been anticipating all along. It's to the immense credit of Malle as both writer and director, and editor Suzanne Baron, that the climax plays out as supremely tactfully as it does, and almost warmly. And by all means, utmost commendations to stars Benoit Ferreux and Lea Massari, whose acting skills and chemistry as scene partners are the bread and butter of 'Murmur of the heart.' At no point could this movie work as well as it does if not for them, and that's absolutely true of the last 10-15 minutes above all. It's a little perplexing to me that this was not greeted with more awards and nominations, for Malle's screenplay and Massari in particular.

It needs to be flatly stated that this will not appeal to all viewers. The harsh sibling relationship between Laurent and his brothers and the close-knit relationship between mother and son both tread or step over a line of abuse, to say nothing of instances of nudity, frank talk of sex, and material that is, shall we say, inappropriate for a boy of the protagonist's age. With that said, however, all this is exactly what makes the feature so tremendously fascinating, rich, and enjoyable. Every component part of this is simply outstanding, from Malle's script and direction to the music, from the acting to the contributions of the, and everything otherwise and in between. Of course, none of this should be surprising; while I've hardly seen them all, every one of Malle's films that I've seen to date have been of only the utmost quality from top to bottom, and this fits handily within that fine company. There are some movies, and some filmmakers, that go beyond questions of personal preference or difficult subject matter, that frankly become essential for anyone who just loves cinema. I'm inclined to believe that 'Murmur of the heart' is one such movie. Personal opinion will vary, but as far as I'm concerned this is pretty much a must-see, and earns my highest, most hearty recommendation!