Hi Aki,
Tonight it was another Louis Malle movie, Soufle au Coeur or Murmur of the Heart – the term for an arrhythmic heart condition which the boy seems to have.
Another coming of age film. Another look back, this time post-war, 1954 in Dijon, France. The French are fighting, and losing, in Vietnam. Young Laurent is a rich kid, spoiled, and the baby. He has two older brothers who are even bigger brats than he is. He is at least smart in school. At least with literature and philosophy. Like the kid in Au Revoir les Enfants he goes to private Catholic school.
Like the other Malle films, this one has a very loose structure, not Hollywood in any sense. A great many small scenes, fragmentary, add up to a portrait of this kid. There is no real structure, but the illusion of a structure is provided by the ‘climax scene.’ This is the scene that when you look back on it, the whole movie has been moving towards – it just didn’t move that way in the Hollywood sense.
In Hollywood all this movement would be on the surface. The hero would say, ‘I want this and I’m going to get it’ and they others would say, ‘You’ll never get it while we’re around’ and then they would struggle and fight over it until the hero either gets it or fails definitively.
OK, so to set this up, let’s look at it backwards the way Malle must have ended up doing: this is the story of a 14 year old boy whose first full sexual experience is with his mother.
So the structure has two sides: the long build up to the incest scene, and the much shorter aftermath.
Malle wants to say, ‘Yes it happened, but it didn’t cripple the kid, it wasn’t bad, it didn’t leave him fixated on his mother.’
So the aftermath scene has the mother telling the kid, ‘It was a beautiful tender moment and nothing to regard with any shame or disgust, it was love, and it will never happen again. It will be our secret, and we will treasure it.’ After this, the same night, the mother falls asleep, the kid gets dressed and goes to the room of a girl he’s been wooing (they are at a spa to take the waters, as part of the treatment for the soufle au coeur (which of course has a double meaning) – isolating mother and son in this vacation setting is part of the strategy to push them into a heightened extraordinary intimacy). He tries to attack helene, but she repulses him. He shrugs. ‘What room is Daphne in?’ he asks, and goes to her, and Daphne does not repulse him. These two scenes tell us that the kid is still interested in girls his own age and not fixated on mom. In the morning he goes back to the room he shares with his mom, and finds his brothers and father have come to visit.
Caught red-handed sneaking back after not being in his room all night, the kid doesn’t know what to do. The father seems mad at first, but his brothers just laugh, and then the father laughs, and the kid laughs, and the mother laughs, and the whole family laughs together. This tells us that the family is not going to be split apart by this secret but they can go on. Indeed, this is the only moment when the whole family seems to be enjoying one another and not fighting – it is as if the tension of the boy’s being a virgin has now left, and that ghost is removed; but I doubt Malle wanted to say, ‘A little incest helps a family’ rather just ‘It didn’t ruin anybody.’
The long buildup involves many many scenes, and they get a little tiresome, as Malle is really pushing it – he shows Laurent and both his brothers as real spoiled rich bastards, and I can’t say I liked any of them or enjoyed their hijinks, though maybe teenagers would enjoy the fantasy of being a brat like that.
The older boys (who are only about 17 and 18 themselves) take young Laurent to a brothel to have his first sex experience, but just as Laurent is on top of the very nice young whore the madam has chosen for him, and he’s going along nicely, in come his drunk brothers and drag him off! So he doesn’t climax, and only counts himself half a virgin at this point.
Then he is after some other girls, but is rather a bashful fellow, just not saying anything then leaping on a girl. But he’s regarded as cute by all the girls, so they don’t get too mad at him.
An interesting strategy Malle uses is to make the mother foreign (Italian), as though he couldn’t imagine a bourgeois French mother going along with it. But I think an American could imagine a French mother doing it, so I think that the strategy works, kind of: the mother being a bit of a free spirit, rather young (35) and Italian kind of makes it ‘all right’ the way we can accept fantasy when it is set in a foreign country or the past.
There was no doubt a lot of discussion and negotiation over how to handle the incest scene. As usual with Malle, the dramatic moments – sex with the mother and then with Daphne afterward – are not what he wants to focus on, so he cuts past both of them. You’ve been in writing groups, you know what showing the script around is like. I’ll bet that the mother was in earlier drafts accepting of the son’s advances on that fatal night. But people reacted in shock and disbelief. The version might even have made it through preproduction into production, and the actress balked, and Malle had to negotiate with her.
So it happens on the night of Bastille Day, and mother is very drunk. Not quite passed out, she responds and kisses her son passionately, many kisses on his head and cheeks before we cut away to the aftermath. But her eyes are closed, she has just broken up with her boyfriend (yes she was having an affair, and son and mother discuss the affair and breakup in a scene that is used to advance the tension between them and bring them more intimacy as one of the final stages of the buildup to the incest scene) – and so we can’t be sure she is even totally aware of what she is doing, does she know who she is with, is she completely in control of her actions? This tends to exculpate her in the eyes of the audience who would otherwise condemn her.
Malle knows he’s dealing with dynamite here, a shocking taboo, and so he has to handle the buildup very carefully.
The movie thus is a good one to study to watch several times if you are interested in the strategies Malle used to try to make this most-shocking, taboo act come off as natural and acceptable and even beautiful.
One final note of interest is the credit given to a co-director. The final credit is ‘written and directed by Louis Malle’ but a few title screens before that there is acknowledgment of the ‘co-metteur en scene’ and I don’t really know what that means, but it is a woman’s name. Maybe she helped with the child actors, which is what I guessed when I saw the title, but at the end now I’m wondering if she was not trying to give the woman’s point of view, and the mother’s point of view. Malle provides the personal recollection or fantasy (I don’t know how autobiographical this might be, but the kid in Au Revoir Les Enfants also had a young, very beautiful mother to whom he was overly attached, and a distant indeed never-seen, father) of the boy.
The whole film is dubbed, which gives it an odd feeling of performances being a little off; but again I was reading subtitles and not seeing the faces too much. The main kid actor can’t act too well, like the kids in Malle’s other films, and so we get the blank looks all too often – they were kind of annoying me in this one. It just seemed like bad acting, bad directing.
The old Hollywood movies when they had child stars, they had kids who could act, but only in the hammy, fake Hollywood style. Malle comes after the Method school changes everything, as well as the new wave, so when he casts kids he’s mostly condemned to amateurs and about the most he can manage is to get a kid who looks right, and then hope that the mosaic of the scenes in the screenplay will add up to a sense of the character that the actor can’t provide.
(written around 10 March 2009)
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