Murmur of the Heart (1971) is a coming of age tale about a 14 year old boy who wants to lose his virginity but is thwarted by circumstance – and later his older brothers – until he has to share a room with his mother. What might have been a scandalous encounter is turned into something else in the hands of director Louis Malle.

Malle, one of the star directors of the French cinema in the 1960s was, in the words of the critics of the time, in somewhat of a decline. He was accused of not living up to his promise as a member of the French New Wave the decade before, an accusation that was leveled against most of his contemporaries. Malle had recently returned to France after a prolonged stay in India in 1970 when he came upon the idea for a film. "Well, as usual the genesis of Le Souffle au coeur [the original French title of the film] is a little mysterious to me....[B]ecause of all that had happened to me: elements of my childhood came back to me with a vengeance. ..I had reached a point where I was beyond rebellion and I was trying to understand what had happened to me and how I'd become who I was. It's not that I consciously went back to my childhood, my childhood came back to me...I remember how I got to do Le Souffle au coeur ...I worked for a while on a book of Georges Bataille called Ma Mère, which is a very dark and tragic story of incest; very beautiful, but very desperate. I wrote an adaptation here, working for something like a month in 1970. At some point I realized: this is not my voice, this is not my tone. But I don't think it was an accident that I became so fascinated by this particular book. There was something about it that had to do with my own experience as a child. I put aside Ma Mère - I'd written fifty pages, something like that – and I started making notes about what had happened to me when I had a heart murmur. I suddenly admitted to myself, maybe for the first time, that I'd had this strange and very passionate relationship with my mother. And then I wrote a long treatment, eighty pages or something, literally in one week for what became Le Souffle au coeur"

Malle was quick to point out that not everything in the film was strictly autobiographical, "[T]hings didn't happen to me the way they happened in the film. The accidental incest as described in the film never happened in real life. But the beginning of the film was pretty close to where I was at that age." Still, the subject matter had him uneasy until he read the script to another writer. ""Jean-Claude Carrière was here in the house at the time. He'd come to revise a play that he'd written. So the night after I'd finished, I read it to him. He said, 'But Louis, it's great, you must do it.' I was scared of it. I thought it was a little too close, too personal, too intimate. But the way I had dealt with it, which was already strongly indicated in the first text, was very much on a comedy level, which I liked very much. The way the mother and the son ended up in the incest scene, it was described as almost inevitable; when it took place it was an accident more than anything else. Actually, there was no guilt involved. I realized reading it to Jean-Claude and discussing it with him that there was something that was completely natural about it. Maybe that's why incest is so scary, why there is such a taboo about it, because it's so natural for maternal love to turn into something else. I realized that if I wanted to be honest with what I had written, I should go all the way. I came up with the idea that the boy would wake up, and obviously would be very disturbed, but the way he handled it was to go downstairs and sleep with the little girl he was flirting with in the scenes before. It was actually during the shooting that the last scene came to me. The scenes at the spa were shot at the end, and even during the shooting I was wondering, 'How can I end the story?' Then I thought: it must end with a laugh, with the surprise of the whole family being there when he comes back holding his shoes...It was very provocative, but I think a great way of ending the story – like a suspended ending, yet giving a clue to how they could handle what had happened."

Michael Sragow wrote in his article, All in the Family, that Murmur of the Heart offers an unusually full and individualized characterization of a boy whose yearnings, sensitivities, and fantasies outstrip his personality – the sort of unformed figure that creators less bold, candid, or inventive than Malle would never dare to present as their surrogate."

Murmur of the Heart earned Louis Malle an Academy Award nomination for "Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Based on Factual Material or Material Not Previously Published" in 1973. It was also nominated for a Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971.

Producer: Vincent Malle, Claude Nedjar
Director: Louis Malle
Screenplay: Louis Malle
Cinematography: Ricardo Aronovich
Film Editing: Suzanne Baron, Catherine Snopko, Solange Leprince
Art Direction: Philippe Turlure
Music: Gaston Freche, Charlie Parker, Henri Renaud
Cast: Lea Massari (Clara Chevalier), Benoit Ferreux (Laurent Chevalier), Daniel Gelin (Charles Chevalier), Michael Lonsdale (Father Henri), Ave Ninchi (Augusta), Gila von Weitershausen (Freda).
C-118m. Letterboxed.

by Lorraine LoBianco

Sources:
Malle on Malle by Louis Malle
All in the Family by Michael Sragow
The Internet Movie Database