Le Souffle au coeur (1971) - film review

Laurent Chevalier is a 15-year old boy who lives with his bourgeois family in Dijon, France, of the 1950s.  He enjoys a close relationship with his adoring young mother, Clara, which neither his father or his teasing brothers can intrude upon.  Laurent discovers a keen interest in jazz and finds that he is attracted to girls.  But it his relationship with his mother that is the most enduring...

This is a perceptive and moving – indeed provocative – film exploring a young teenage boy’s sexual awakening.  It captures the anxieties, the optimism, the frustrations, of a teenager’s passage to manhood, in a way that must strike a chord with anyone who has lived through those turbulent years of adolescence.

But this is more than just a film about teenage angst.  A teenager’s growing attraction for girls is muddled with his intense love for his mother, whom he depends upon for emotional security.  Inevitably, the son-mother relationship takes an incestuous turn which ought to shock but, because it is handled with such sensitivity, it doesn’t.

In his earlier films, Louis Malle has taken on difficult subjects (suicide in Le feu follet, physical love in Les amants), but he succeeds because his approach is genuinely sympathetic and compassionate.  The same is true of Le souffle au coeur, where he broaches the greatest taboo of all: incest.

Le souffle au coeur is the first film in a loose trilogy on the theme of the corruption of childhood innocence (followed by Lacombe Lucien and Au revoir, les enfants ).  All three films reveal Louis Malle’s deep understanding of child psychology and a natural affinity for working with child actors.

In Le souffle au coeur, Laurent is an incredibly complex character, a mass of contradictions - like any young teeanger – and Benoît Ferreux’s portrayal brilliantly captures this.  Few directors have the ability to inspire such adult performances from very young actors.  Malle’s talent for speaking through the mouths of children so convincingly is just one of this great director’s remarkable traits.

© James Travers 2000

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?