Murmur of the Heart

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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?