Le souffle au coeur
Tags: anti war, romantic, prank

Plot synopsis:
Laurent Chevalier is a nearly 15-year-old boy living in Dijon in 1954, who loves jazz, always receives the highest grades in his class and who opposes the First Indochina War. He has an unloving father who is a gynecologist, an affectionate Italian mother, Clara, and two older brothers, Thomas and Marc. One night, Thomas and Marc take Laurent to a brothel, where Laurent loses his virginity to a prostitute before they are disrupted by his drunken brothers. Upset, he leaves on a scouting trip, where he catches scarlet fever and is left with a heart murmur.
After Laurent is bedridden and cared for and entertained by Clara and their maid Augusta, he and Clara check into a hotel while he receives treatment at a sanatorium. He takes interest in two young girls at the hotel, Helene and Daphne, and also spies on his mother in the bathtub. Clara temporarily leaves with her lover, but comes back distraught after their breakup, and is comforted by her son. After a night of heavy drinking on Bastille Day, Laurent and Clara have sex. Clara tells him afterwards that this incest will not be repeated, but that they should not look back on it with remorse. Afterwards, Laurent leaves their room, and after unsuccessfully trying to seduce Helene, spends the night with Daphne.

Review: 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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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..
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.
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 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.
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.
Louis Malle perhaps has directed his most controversial film about Laurent and his complicated relationship with his mother.
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.
While sexuality is another theme in this classic film, there are touching scenes between the Laurent and his mother.
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.
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.
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.
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 best film by Louis Malle ( that's not saying much ) is a story about the awakening, sexual and otherwise, of a scampy 14-year old Parisian named Laurent Chevalier.
He's a precocious teen, and lest we forget, someone is always ready to remind us -- each character sees the same Camus book laying around on his nightstand and says something like "You're a real intellectual!"  One assumes Laurent, played with bandy-legged aplomb by Benoit Ferreux, represents Malle as he wishes he were at a younger age.
Not the masterpiece that I expected from an Oscar nominated play, but it was an interesting film.Directed by Louis Malle (Au revoir, les enfants, Atlantic City) and starring Benoît Ferreux (Victory) in his first film as a 15-year-old discovering sex, it it a reflective look at youth in the upper classes of French society.Laurent (Ferreux) runs the table with masturbation, which result in counseling with an all-too-familiar Catholic priest; a rite of passage trip to the local bordello by his brothers, where he meets the typical caring prostitute (Gila von Weitershausen - Malle's companion at the time); attempts with girls at a spa; and, finally, a tryst with his step-mother (Lea Massari).
Realistically told is the tale of a 15-year-old boy from a well-off family learning about love and sex and growing up in general.What makes the film more successful than other similar work, I think, is the appropriate setting of the tone.
Although it is overshadowed by its portrayal of an incestuous affair that is depicted mainly in the film's final quarter, one must understand that this film is more than just "A Portrait of the Incest as a Young Man"; rather it is a tender look at adolescence, an accurate glimpse into the confused, sexually obsessed years of being a teenager.Shot and scripted with obvious nostalgia and a lovely autobiographical bite, "Murmur of the Heart" is splendid in its ability to be sensitive towards some strong topics.
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.
A tender, witty and often raw coming-of-age film from Louis Malle.The film follows Laurent, a 14 year old boy, who is coming to terms with love and sex.The relationship between the son and his mother is played with brilliant conviction.The music score has some great jazz on it, from Parker to Gillespie.Le Soufflé au Cour also has a great script, where the characters are totally believable and have depths beyond your average film-fare.
I didn't like the way the film began, and although I kept expecting it to click into gear and improve, it never did.The rather anarchic household was tedious and not nearly as funny as it was no doubt intended to be; but that's not the real problem.The boorish elder brothers deserve a slap in the chops; but they're not the real problem either.The three brothers' obsession with sex is overdone, though not greatly so if I remember my own adolescence correctly; that's not the real problem either.And neither is the relentless "free-spiritedness" of the intensely irritating mother, although it certainly doesn't help the film.No, the real problem is the supposed resolution of what passes for a plot.
Yeah, right.And then son slips out of bed, tiptoes down the hall, tries (but fails, in the one faintly believable scene in this ridiculous sequence) to rape one of the two sympathetic characters in the whole film (the other being the nice prostitute at the brothel), and moves on to spend the night with another girl, a willing one this time.
As if.And finally, when he creeps back to his own room the next morning and finds his father and brothers there, fully clothed while his mother's still in just a dressing-gown, the film ends with everybody laughing.I've got nothing against sex, nothing against nudity, I love French films and I respect and admire Louis Malle.
A French film about the relationship between a teen-aged boy (Ferreux) and his mother (Massari).
Well, I guess more generally it is about Ferreux' coming of age, a kind of Bildungsfilm, because other characters play a part in his development -- a girl his age, a priest and tutor, and so forth.Ferreux and Massari are a little closer, a little more playful together than a boy and his mother should be, and there are little warnings along the way that his budding sexuality is budding in what most people would consider not quite the right direction.
It was bad enough that the three brothers are sociopathic sex fiends--but in the end of the movie the lead character has sex with his own mother (a biological one, to boot).
However, considering this is from Louis Malle, who brought us the lovely story "Pretty Baby" (about an 11 year-old who works in a whorehouse and is the object of desire for an old freak), this movie didn't come as a total surprise.
The main character has sex with his own mother and this is treated in the film like a loving and sweet thing!!!
Can't there be SOME boundary over which you don't pass in a film?!Just for the record, I'm against mother-son incest.
In 1954, in the Spring, the fourteen year-old boy Laurent Chevalier (Benoît Ferreux) lives with his Italian mother Clara Chevalier (Lea Massari); his father, the gynecologist Charles Chevalier (Daniel Gélin); and his teenager brothers Thomas (Fabien Ferreux) and Marc (Marc Winocourt) in an upper-class neighborhood in Dijon.
When the doctor finds that Laurent has a murmur in his heart, he suggests that the boy should go to Bourbon-les-Eaux to heal and Clara stays with him in the same room.
"Le Soufflé de Couer" is a coming of age story with Oedipus complex of a young boy in France in the 50's.
The fourteen year-old boy has an incestuous relationship with his mother; is molested by a priest; smokes; drinks; shoplifts; has sex with prostitute; cheats; drives reckless on the road with his brothers, but all the situations are credible and developed very naturally.
The sexual tension between Laurent and Clara is present from the beginning to the end and Lea Massari is extremely beautiful and sexy.
Laurent is an obnoxious fourteen-year-old boy who has two brothers almost as obnoxious as he is and a father who is not bad in the obnoxious department himself.
Now, in a movie in which a boy has sex with his mother, we figure one of two things will happen: either he will turn into some kind of Norman Bates psycho, or the incestuous affair will be a deep, meaningful, transformative experience for the lad.
I assumed that as a result of his having sex with his mother, he would stop being obnoxious and start being nice, warm-hearted, and loving, just like her.
By the end of the movie, he is still his same old rotten self.Before they have sex, his mother says that they will just do it one time, and then they will never talk about it again.
Of course, the movie indicates that they will forget about the fact that they had sex, because Louis Malle, the writer and director, wanted it that way.
Malle's film was controversial because it allegedly depicts a mother-son incestuous encounter in a positive light, but I'm wondering what film people have seen!
I remain puzzled by the film's glowing reputation all these years, and wonder if it is just because Louis Malle is one of those artists that people feel obligated to praise.
A French coming-of-age comedy-drama I've known by reputation, Murmur of the Heart (1971) by Louis Malle has been on my must-watch list for what feels like a long time now.
Supposedly, Malle claimed it as a semi-autobiography- quite a thing to acknowledge when his protagonist, a stand-in for himself, goes to bed with his own mother!Murmur of the Heart follows the French boy Laurent, almost-15.
Despite this, Laurent and Clara share a bond, and she is more like a friend to her three sons than a mother.Much of the glimpses into the Chevalier household are slice of life, feel authentic and have real humour to them.
They're mean to their servants, but this has a sort of dark comic value as well.The film reaches its special status when Laurent falls ill and gets a heart murmur.
On one hand is the (not so) sophisticated art-house film lover who thinks this movie is a challenging French "coming of age" film.
Make no mistake: if you actually thought Malle was suggesting that mother-son incest could possibly be a sweet, tender moment between two healthy, happy people, or if you laughed when one of the arrogant, obnoxious children wantonly destroyed a Corot hanging on the wall, and if you perceived all of the violent, awkward treatment of the domestic help and women throughout the film as tender or comedic coming of age moments, then you really need to re-evaluate things.
There's no way whatsoever that Malle intended any of the characters in this family to be anything other than detestable -- and it starts with the detestable mother, who damages everyone and everything she touches.
I think Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart is my very favorite French film because it was the first French film I saw long ago and the one that at the time, made a deep impression on me.
I have to admit, the scene where Laurant and his mother have sex was very shocking to me, but I'm not going to let that decide whether this was a good movie or not.
On top of that he has to do this as a fifteen year-old playing a fifteen year-old written with an apparently much older soul.I think the compassion/conflict of the son for his mother is true, agonizing and often beautiful here...but in watching the trailer for this film that came with the DVD, I almost wonder if Malle felt a need to take his memoirs and season them with something a bit more salacious?
From director Louis Malle (Atlantic City, Au Revoir Les Enfants), this film featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die when I read more about it sounded like something with a risky subject, which of course intrigued me more.
Critics obviously had the highest concerns about the incest storyline of the film, more so than anything else going on, but this is understandable bearing in mind the mother-son relationship and the age gap, however it is both shocking and fascinating to watch, it was for me what made the film a very interesting drama.
The movie is well filmed and not without charm and it may have been groundbreaking at the time, but it seems rather timeworn some thirty-six years on.I found the behavior of Laurent and his two brothers bothersome.
A fifteen year old Parissien boy discovers girls of all ages and types, has to figure out what to do with them, and also has to figure out how to come to terms with his relationship with his mother and the fact that she's female too.It's one of those films that's very true-to-life but not something you can really show to someone of that age without confusing them more.