In May of 1954, the colony that had been called French Indochina fell to the Vietnamese at the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Louis Malle’s marvelous Murmur of the Heart (now streaming as part of the “French New Wave” program on the Criterion Channel) is not a war movie, but it’s very much informed by the end of French colonial rule. The fate of Indochina is a topic of polite cocktail party conversation amongst the bourgeoise attending a spa that breezy summer, but nobody takes it particularly seriously. Nobody takes much of anything at all particularly seriously in Malle’s semi-autobiographical 1971 masterpiece, which looks affectionately askance at a waning aristocracy and a way of life without consequences as a young man comes of age. It’s an enormously entertaining picture, presumably the gentlest and most endearing movie ever made about a boy who has sex with his mother.
Re-released to American theaters in 1989 after Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants had become an arthouse blockbuster two years earlier, I can still recall all the hubbub about “the incest movie” from the My Dinner With Andre director, who was probably still best-known in the states for impregnating wife Candice Bergen when she was at the advanced age of 39. (This was a big deal back then. Strange stuff sold magazines.) What’s so shocking about the mother-son sex scene in Murmur of the Heart is how matter-of-fact it is – a momentary lapse of some already blurry boundaries that both parties agree to think back on fondly but must never happen again. Malle was already no stranger to controversy, as his 1958 Dominique Vivant adaptation The Lovers prompted an obscenity case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, and 20 years later his notorious Pretty Baby featured a nude, 12-year-old Brooke Shields having her virginity sold off at an auction. In the company of such provocations, this mild-mannered Oedipal romp appears almost tame by comparison.
We first meet the surgingly pubescent Laurent Chevalier (such a magnificently French character name he should be wearing a beret and carrying a baguette) as he’s sneaking cigarettes and shoplifting Charlie Parker records. He’s a shy, slight kid often tormented by his two perpetually horny older brothers and all but ignored outright by his stern, unforgiving father, a gynecologist who appears incapable of amusement. Laurent is closest with his mother Clara, a flame-haired Italian beauty (played by Lea Massari, the girl who went missing in L’Avventura) much closer to her boys’ ages than that of their old fuddy-duddy father. The four of them are practically playmates, roughhousing while mom walks around in her underwear and freely admits she’s never gotten the hang of the whole high society decorum thing.
The first half of the film is largely plotless, following Laurent through various rites of passage, including avoiding the advances of a handsy priest and trip to a brothel where his drunken brothers play a cruel practical joke. (Malle grew up around 10 or 15 years earlier than when the story is set, but said that a lot of these escapades were inspired by his own experiences. Except the incest, of course.) After a bout of scarlet fever, Laurent develops the cardiac ailment from which the film takes its title and must recuperate at a luxurious spa in the French countryside, where a booking mishap leaves him sharing a room with his mother. The quarters quickly become a little too close for comfort.
Turns out she’s been sneaking around with a lover, and this makes her bookish little boy incredibly jealous. Throughout their stay, the two keep dancing right up to the edges of what is and isn’t appropriate, as when he steals her copy of “The Story of O” or gets caught peeking at her in the bathtub. It’s almost a cliché, having this wild-haired, young Mediterranean mama turning heads at highfalutin’ dinner parties (Malle’s own mother was much older, and French) but Massari plays the character with such childlike exuberance you honestly believe she he’s never had any inkling of her effect on men. Especially young boys, who swarm around her relentlessly at the resort.
This is all coming to an end soon, anyway. Malle set the movie in 1954 for a reason, as an empire declines somewhere far away from these opulent, old-fashioned dinner parties and fancy feasts. The bebop records over which Laurent obsesses signal the dawn of a new era, a cooler consciousness than these musty, moribund traditions and (sometimes literally) incestuous affairs. The director has always been ambivalent about being born to a wealthy family, and though Murmur of the Heart takes a slightly satirical position on these people (he does make his alter ego an actual motherfucker, after all) the twists of the knife are quite gentle, considering. It’s an easy picture to like, the kind where you find yourself smiling when thinking back upon it. Especially the ending, a moment of laughter and family bonding that couldn’t possibly be more perfect.
“Murmur of the Heart” is now streaming as part of the “French New Wave” program on the Criterion Channel.