{"id":17839,"date":"2022-02-04T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-04T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=17839"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:13:10","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:13:10","slug":"classic-corner-murmur-of-the-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/classic-corner-murmur-of-the-heart\/","title":{"rendered":"Classic Corner: Murmur of the Heart<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u2019s marvelous Murmur of the Heart<\/em> (now streaming<\/a> as part of the \u201cFrench New Wave\u201d<\/a> program on the Criterion Channel) is not a war movie, but it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s an enormously entertaining picture, presumably the gentlest and most endearing movie ever made about a boy who has sex with his mother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Re-released to American theaters in 1989 after Malle\u2019s Au Revoir Les Enfants<\/em> had become an arthouse blockbuster two years earlier, I can still recall all the hubbub about \u201cthe incest movie\u201d from the My Dinner With Andre <\/em>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\u2019s so shocking about the mother-son sex scene in Murmur of the Heart<\/em> is how matter-of-fact it is \u2013 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<\/em> prompted an obscenity case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, and 20 years later his notorious Pretty Baby<\/em> 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s sneaking cigarettes and shoplifting Charlie Parker records. He\u2019s 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\u2019Avventura<\/em>) much closer to her boys\u2019 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\u2019s never gotten the hang of the whole high society decorum thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turns out she\u2019s 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\u2019t appropriate, as when he steals her copy of \u201cThe Story of O\u201d or gets caught peeking at her in the bathtub. It\u2019s almost a clich\u00e9, having this wild-haired, young Mediterranean mama turning heads at highfalutin\u2019 dinner parties (Malle\u2019s own mother was much older, and French) but Massari plays the character with such childlike exuberance you honestly believe she he\u2019s never had any inkling of her effect on men. Especially young boys, who swarm around her relentlessly at the resort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> 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\u2019s 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\u2019t possibly be more perfect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Murmur of the Heart” is now streaming<\/a> as part of the \u201cFrench New Wave\u201d<\/a> program on the Criterion Channel<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Louis Malle\u2019s semi-autobiographical 1971 film remains as warm, funny, and provocative as ever. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":633,"featured_media":17841,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1431,1422],"class_list":["post-17839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/633"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17839"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22056,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17839\/revisions\/22056"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}