Last year, I dedicated an entire Criterion Month to “Horny Movies.” I reviewed films like Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, and Louis Malle’s The Lovers. I had a blast exploring not just sexuality in cinema, but how different countries and different eras portrayed it. So when I heard Malle had another “horny” movie in the Criterion Collection, I immediately added it to my list. I just wish I’d known the sexuality in Murmur of the Heart was centered around a teenage boy… and his mom.
I had no idea, but also, saying this is a movie about a boy who sleeps with his mother is a gross oversimplification. It’s not inaccurate, but there’s a lot more going on here. Murmur of the Heart is a coming-of-age story about a 14-year-old boy growing up in postwar France and discovering sexuality through his friends, girls, literature, observing the adults around him, and yes, through his mom. Despite that premise, the film has somehow managed to skirt any kind controversy. Why is that?
Murmur of the Heart was Louis Malle’s eighth feature film. The 26-year-old who made The Lovers, a movie deemed so scandalous it made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, was a much different filmmaker than the nearly 40-year-old Malle who made Murmur of the Heart.
In the years between, Malle made bleak dramas, comedies, crime films, period adventures, and documentaries, refusing to be pigeonholed. But it was his months-long trip through India in the late ‘60s, where he made the documentary Calcutta, that inspired the filmmaker to make a more personal work. A work inspired by his own childhood.
Set in Dijon, France in 1954, Laurent (Benoît Ferreux) is a 14-year-old boy who loves jazz, the Tour de France, and the opposite sex. He has a cold, unloving father and is teased by his older brothers. In particular, when they take Laurent to have sex with a prostitute in a brothel and then crash the intimate session. Also, I guess kids could get away with going to Brothels in ‘50s Europe.
The only person in Laurent’s life he feels comfortable around is his mother Clara (Lea Massari) a beautiful and free spirited, if not promiscuous woman who sings and plays guitar and reads sexy books like The Story of O, which Laurent swipes and reads himself. Their bond grows closer after Laurent gets scarlet fever at camp and develops a heart murmur, leaving him bedridden for a month as his mother nurses him back to health.
The film is a series of misadventures as Laurent encounters sex in all shapes and forms, even a predatory priest he narrowly avoids. Eventually, Laurent gets treatment for his murmur at a sanatorium and Clara and Laurent check into a hotel nearby. A hotel where they are booked into a shared room.
At the hotel, Laurent tries to connect with a couple girls his age, to mixed results. We only see him feeling like himself around his mom, a feeling accentuated when Clara leaves the hotel for two days to spend time with one of her lovers. She comes back distraught and that’s when the two, uh ya know.
The scene is near the end of the film and is a brief passing moment in the dark. Clara says they must never do this again and I’m like “Thank god.” It’s funny, they treat it as gracefully as a film could ever treat such an interaction but it’s hard to not see it as a Louis Malle’s perverted fantasy. Why didn’t it stir controversy?
Well, it did a little. It was temporarily banned from French Television. That’s about it. I think what it comes down to here is tone. The film isn’t using incest to titillate, rather as a storytelling device. “What’s the most compelling and sexually confusing/enlightening scenario Laurent could find himself in?” It’s this.
Overall, the movie feels like an honest, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes heartwarming, look at the transition from boyhood to manhood. The performances are natural (Lea Massari is fantastic) , and the situations believable (most of them). The film was well received and nabbed Malle an Oscar Nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
In my review of The Lovers, I called Louis Malle a filmmaking chameleon. I find this truer with every Malle movie I see, and I’m excited to watch more because he approaches every idea with a naturalistic touch. He’s a master of his craft. He even excelled at making American films. A true icon. A pervert maybe. But an icon nonetheless.