MURMUR OF THE HEART Movie Review

Dearest Love
La Souffle au Coeur

Louis Malle's smashing 1971 Murmur of the Heart, a brilliantly comic and delicately persuasive portrait of a smart, sensitive, confused 14-year-old French boy and his smart, sensitive, confused Italian mom, remains one of the most audacious and exhilarating movies of Malle's career. Young Laurent Chevalier (Benoit Ferreux) and his brothers are the sons of a physician, living a privileged life in Dijon in the early 1950s.The boys and their mother (Lea Massari) take their status and pleasures for granted, and guess what? They don't pay with their lives! They don't pay with their souls! They don't even fall into poverty. Laurent, however, is found to have a heart murmur which leads to his mother taking him on a recuperative holiday away from family and friends. For everyone involved, it turns out to be a vacation to remember. The close relationship between the mutually adoring mother and her son is presented with a natural, spontaneous, totally convincing consistency of character. As you've probably heard, there is a taboo-shattering moment of mother-son incest near the end of the film; though startling, it's neither shocking nor gratuitous. The transportingly sweet, laughter-filled moments which follow the scene do seem revolutionary, however, and appropriately so. Malle's characters find their salvation in the unconditional, gloriously unrepentant bond of love between a woman and her sons, rather than in the far more easy (and traditional) slathering on of guilt as the solution to everything—as a way to punish the characters, and to punish us for liking them. (Whether it was an unconscious stunt or simply an accident—not that Freud would believe in such a thing—I first saw Murmur of the Heart with my mother. Well, I was 21. She loved the picture, though I recall that she did slide all the way over to the other side of the taxi afterward.)

NEXT STOP … Zazie dans le Metro, My Life As a Dog, Luna

1971 (R) 118m/C FR Benoit Ferreux, Daniel Gelin, Lea Massari, Corinne Kersten, Jacqueline Chauveau, Marc Wincourt, Michael Lonsdale; D: Louis Malle; W: Louis Malle; C: Ricardo Aronovich; M: Charlie Parker. Nominations: Academy Awards ‘72: Best Story & Screenplay. VHS, LV ORI