Le Souffle au coeur (1971)
Directed by Louis Malle

Film Review

The awful truth

Throughout his filmmaking career, Louis Malle showed an obvious penchant for tackling highly problematic subjects in a direct, rigorous and wholly non-judgemental manner.  This earned him a fair amount of criticism in some quarters (notably the right-leaning press) but also considerable respect among his peers and with the more progressively minded cinema-going public.  When it was first released in April 1971, Le Souffle au coeur (Malle's tenth and most daring feature) unleashed a storm of controversy, mainly on account of its boldly explicit portrayal of an incestuous relationship between a woman in her early thirties and her sexually precocious 14-year-old son.  So inflammatory was the film's subject matter that Malle was denied funding for it when he presented his scenario to the Commission de contrôle des films cinématographiques in July 1970.  The film was saved when Marianne Productions, a French subsidiary of the large American company Paramount, agreed to stump up the cash - no doubt encouraged by the director's track record as a box office winner (Viva Maria! had sold 3.5 million tickets, Les Amants 2.6 million).

At the time, incest was just about the last taboo standing in French cinema and this explains why the film was given an 18 certificate even though it has practically no sexually explicit content - apart from a few brief nude shots and some pretty innocuous allusions to masturbation. (It's worth noting that mother-son incest had been alluded to in several earlier French films, for example Jacques Feyder's Pension Mimosas (1935) and Jean Cocteau's Les Parents terribles (1950), but never as overtly as in Malle's film.)   Predictably, a brief scene in the film implying the presence of paedophilia in a Catholic-run institution was vehemently condemned in the Christian press, although (as recent events have shown) Malle was perhaps understating the extent to which some Catholic priests preyed on young boys in their care.  Far from damaging Malle's reputation, the heated furore in the press worked to the film's advantage, granting it an audience of 2.7 million in France (making this Malle's fourth biggest success at the French box office).  The film was generally well-received by the critics and was nominated for an Oscar in 1973, in the category of Best Original Screenplay.

The hostile media reaction to Le Souffle au coeur (a.k.a. Murmur of the Heart) was as excessive and unjustified as it had been to Malle's earlier film Les Amants (1958), which acquired instant notoriety for its groundbreaking nude love screen that resulted in a high-profile obscenity court case in the United States.  The director was subsequently pilloried for his treatment of two other taboo subjects - depression and suicide - in his remarkable (arguably greatest) film Le Feu follet (1963), and would later be widely condemned for his supposed 'apologia' for war-time collaboration, Lacombe Lucien (1974).  The febrile over-sensitivity in the French press to the unconventional themes that interested Malle may have been part of his motivation to seek refuge from his native France on two occasions in the course of his career.  His first self-imposed 'exile' came in the wake of Le Voleur (1967), which left him demoralised with western filmmaking and led him to take on his most ambitious project - a seven part television documentary series L'Inde fantôme (1969) and related documentary feature Calcutta (1969).  Malle's reluctance to return to conventional filmmaking persisted for another half-decade during which he made another two notable documentaries, Humain, trop humain (1973) and Place de la République (1974).  Le Souffle au coeur was an odd digression for this period, the only feature-length fictional film that Malle made between 1967 and 1974.

From 1978 to 1986, the director profited from a burst of creative freedom during his eight-year stay in the United States, where he tackled a diverse range of subjects in films as varied as Atlantic City (1980), My Dinner with André (1981) and Crackers (1983).  Even here he still continued to attract controversy, particularly with Pretty Baby (1978), his brave foray into the sordid arena of child prostitution.  It was only late in his career - with his acclaimed Occupation era masterpiece Au revoir les enfants (1987) - that Louis Malle acquired the recognition and respect that was his due.  For most of his career he was widely regarded as a lone maverick who used 'difficult' subjects in his films for questionable motives.  His traditional approach to filmmaking and the evident lack of thematic or stylistic unity in his work prevented him from acquiring the auteur prestige of his Nouvelle Vague contemporaries, although this had more to do with the somewhat flawed nature of the auteur theories of the time and less to do with Malle's integrity and innate ability as a filmmaker.  In truth, Louis Malle was one of the most radical and committed cinéastes of his generation, and whilst many of his films were indeed hugely popular with audiences and encompass a wide range of themes, they provide a valuable social critique of their time and reveal a level of engagement with human affairs across a wide spectrum that was virtually unrivalled - at least in French cinema from the late 1950s to the early 1990s.  Arguably, there is a far higher degree of consistency, emotional truth and social relevance in Malle's wildly eclectic oeuvre than was shown by any of his more highly lauded peers in the French New Wave.

La vie n'est pas un roman

While the directors of the Nouvelle Vague were concerned primarily with authenticity through the process and technique of filmmaking, Louis Malle achieved a purer form of authenticity through his sensitive treatment of the subjects that interested him.  The apparently conventional look and structure of his films set him way apart from the theory-obsessed New Wave innovators, but he was just as radical - arguably more so - in his handling of themes that practically no one else dared to touch at the time.  A compassionate study of marital infidelity (Les Amants), the reasons that drive a man to kill himself (Le Feu follet), a teenage boy's incestuous relationship with his mother (Le Souffle au coeur), the easy corruption of a mixed-up adolescent by fascistic thinking (Lacombe Lucien) - these were not subjects that would garner Malle much love in the (predominantly right-wing) French press, but, as the public reaction bore out, they were subjects of great interest to the wider population.  By tackling incest in such a direct and dispassionate manner, Le Souffle au coeur was bound to ruffle a few feathers, and it still remains Malle's most controversial film to this day, but by showing us something we naturally find distasteful and shocking it provides a great service.  It is surely much better to see the world as it really is (warts and all), rather than through the rose-tinted spectacles foisted on us by an over-puritanical censor.

Coming-of-age dramas have become grimly commonplace in cinema over the past few decades, but in the early 1970s the genre was still pretty much virgin territory.  The most famous French film of this kind is François Truffaut's Les 400 coups (1959), one that offers a far more sanitised (and hence more critic-friendly) depiction of adolescence than Malle's incest-laden little horror.  Truffaut's film is certainly an engaging, impressively crafted piece of cinema and Jean-Pierre Léaud's portrayal of the young teen rebel Antoine Doinel is justifiably celebrated for its charm and 'authenticity'.  Yet compared with Malle's earthier Le Souffle au coeur it is pure artifice, a cloyingly timorous representation of reality reeking of the sickly bourgeois romanticism that is so emblematic of Truffaut's work.  Malle's film may not have the sweetly alluring poetry and crowd-pleasing hyped-up emotionality of Les 400 coups but it is clearly the more genuine, the more convincingly drawn and consequently the worthier of the two films.  Watching them back-to-back today it is apparent that the earlier film (a New Wave classic) is a thing 'of its time', far less relevant to us now than the more prosaic and insightful one made by Malle twelve years later.  Each film is excellent in its own way but Le Souffle au coeur is surely the greater film as it compels its audience to confront the coming-of-age truths that all too many writers and filmmakers stay clear of, either through fear of causing offence or because they lack the insight and sensitivity required to tackle so difficult a subject.

The repressive bourgeois context of Le Souffle au coeur is significant as it allows Malle to include the film within his wider even-handed critique of bourgeois society (which encompasses such films as Les Amants, Le Feu follet and Le Voleur), whilst also allowing him to draw directly on his own personal experiences as a wild teenager growing up in a strict but privileged upper-middle class milieu.  That this is the most auto-biographical of Malle's films is evident in its location in a provincial town of the mid-1950s and the shared interest of the director and his boy protagonist Laurent in jazz music, French philosophy and modern literature.  Like Laurent, Malle grew up in an affluent bourgeois household and endured the rigours of austere Catholic-run educational establishments.  The film's most personal touch is the inclusion of various pieces by the great jazz musician Charlie Parker, recalling Malle's use of an original score by Miles Davis on his earlier fictional feature Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958).  Le Souffle au coeur has some notable departures from its director's own lived experiences.  Its most controversial aspect - an incestuous mother-son relationship - was lifted from Georges Bataille's unfinished novel Ma mère, which was published posthumously in 1966.  The same novel was subsequently adapted for cinema in 2004 by Christophe Honoré (with Louis Garrel and Isabelle Huppert in the lead roles) and dwells more on the sickeningly perverse nature of the relationship between the two main characters.  In Malle's film, the excessive intimacy that Laurent shares with his mother is treated in a far more sympathetic vein, and would seem to be justified by the total lack of interest (or consideration) shown to the boy by his self-obsessed authoritarian father - a common complaint in bourgeois households.

The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie

As in Truffaut's film, the hero of Le Souffle au coeur is excused for his shocking behaviour by the even more shocking way in which he is treated by his elders who should know better.  Laurent appears to be materially well off but his psychological well-being is clearly jeopardised by the unbalanced nature of his relationship with his parents - the father who regards him as an irritating distraction, the mother who becomes overly attached to him when marriage fails to meet her immense emotional needs.  Further harm is provided by the boy's older brothers, who are conditioned by their own parental neglect to mercilessly tease their younger sibling (even resorting to what is obviously a form of cruel sexual abuse), and a Catholic priest/teacher (Michel Lonsdale) who has a habit of fondling young boys whilst taking confession.  The film ends with Laurent well and truly indoctrinated into not only man's estate (after bedding his mother and another random female in quick succession) but also the complacent bourgeois mindset, safe is he in the knowledge that his little dalliances will remain secret.  Unlike Truffaut (who went on to make a series of films charting the problematic love life of his alter ego), Malle never revisited Laurent in a later film, although it is not too difficult to see how he might turn out - the archetypal bourgeois hypocrite, respectably married with a string of mistresses and offspring he wilfully neglects.

Le Souffle au coeur is the first in a trilogy of films (followed by Lacombe Lucien and Au revoir, les enfants) in which Malle explores the theme of the loss of childhood innocence through the experiences of a sensitive teenage boy.  In each of these films, the director wins his audience over mainly through his unerring ability to coax a convincing performance from his adolescent, untrained lead actor.  Benoît Ferreux is one of Malle's most remarkable finds and, as the jazz-loving, mum-hugging Laurent he is every bit as engaging as Jean-Pierre Léaud was in Les 400 coups - and just as believable in what is so obviously a far more challenging role.  (It's worth adding en passant that Laurent's older brother Thomas is played by Ferreux's real-life brother Fabien, a fact that no doubt accounts for the strikingly naturalistic quality of the scenes of Laurent and his brothers.)   Throughout the film, Benoît Ferreux's low-key performance captivates and never lets us forget the vulnerability, cruelty and confusion of early adolescence.  His precisely drawn pint-size Oedipus shows all of the qualities that alternately delight and infuriate an attentive parent as the self-willed, hormone-doused offspring stumbles across the mine-strewn no man's land between childhood and maturity.  After this astonishing screen debut, Ferreux was courted by several prominent filmmakers and crops up in a number of notable films, including Nadine Trintignant's Défense de savoir (1973), Claude Chabrol's Violette Nozière (1976) and Alain Corneau's Crime d'amour (2010).

Le Souffle au coeur's other outstanding performance was supplied by the Italian beauty Lea Massari, who, as Laurent's tragically infantilised mother Clara, is just as successful as Ferreux in arousing our compassion in spite of her obviously flawed character.  So convincingly played is the relationship between the mother and her son that for the greater part of the film it appears totally innocent.  It is only when the two characters are forced to share the same room (for the last segment of the film set in the sanatorium) that the more complex and troubling nature of Laurent's feelings for his mother become apparent, and if we are shocked it is not because of the overtly incestuous form these take, but rather because Malle presents this seedy awakening in such a downplayed, matter-of-fact manner.  The fact that, after having lost his virginity to his mum, Laurent then goes off to immediately bed a girl of his own age (and thereby presumably kill off his mother infatuation) implies that no real harm has been done, although Malle leaves us wondering whether this is indeed the case.  The awkwardness of the family reunion that closes the film makes it clear that Laurent's process of maturation has still some way to go, although he appears to have learned at least one valuable lesson.  Some things are best not to talk about - particularly those things relating to the erratic murmurs of the heart.

Film Synopsis

France, 1954.  Laurent Chevalier is a 14-year old boy who enjoys a comfortable, cosseted existence with his affluent middleclass family in Dijon.  His father Charles is so preoccupied with his work as a gynaecologist that he has no time for parental duties, but his younger Italian mother Clara more than makes up for this, smothering the boy with the affection he craves.  Whilst his older brothers Thomas and Marc are happy to fritter away their time on idle pursuits and lewd practical jokes, Laurent takes life far more seriously, working hard to get the best grades in school, doing his best to be a model boy scout and voicing his opposition to the war in Indochina.  He enjoys jazz - especially Charlie Parker - and delights in his naughtier habits, which include stealing records, upsetting the family's over-worked housemaid and relieving himself in bed with erotic literature.  The latter creates some discomfort for the boy when he is forced to confess his sins to Père Henri, a teacher at his strictly-run Catholic school.  Thankfully, the godly man isn't too severe - he shows his compassion by gently caressing the youngsters in his care.  Laurent's childhood has been pretty idyllic - until the fateful day when he glimpses his mother in a car with another man.  In a paroxysm of shock, the boy rushes into his father's surgery to break the news of Clara's infidelity but he is promptly expelled after what Dr Chevalier sees as just one more example of his son's unruly behaviour.

With Laurent fast approaching his 15th birthday, Thomas and Marc take it upon themselves to relieve their baby brother of his virginity by taking him to a high-class brothel.  Laurent is far from pleased when his initiation into manhood is interrupted by the pranksters' sudden appearance at a crucial moment in the proceedings.  The boy regains his dignity during a scouting holiday but is hit with another blow when he is diagnosed as having a heart murmur.  Laid up in bed, Laurent enjoys the attention lavished on him by his over-concerned mother, although the prospect of having to spend most of the summer being treated in a sanatorium is somewhat less appealing.  As accommodation is scarce, the mother and son end up having to share a single room for the duration of the boy's treatment - an arrangement that suits them both.  Laurent doesn't enjoy the therapy he is given, which includes being regularly hosed with cold water, but he has the opportunity to meet other teenagers, including two attractive girls, Hélène and Daphne.

One morning, Clara goes off without a word to her son so that she can join her mystery lover.  Laurent soon gets over his feeling of abandonment as he surrenders to his animal attraction for Hélène, even though she shows him no encouragement and prefers to spend time with her friend Daphne - proof that she is a lesbian according to one of Laurent's new pals.  After a short while, Clara returns and it is apparent to her son that her love affair has ended abruptly.  To make up for her emotional upset, Clara showers Laurent with even more motherly affection, and this greater intimacy leads the precocious teenager to spy on his mother when she is bathing.  On the night of the Bastille Day celebrations, Clara gets hopelessly drunk and when she returns to her room she is barely aware of her son's amorous intent when he climbs into bed with her.  Afterwards, Clara consoles Laurent by telling him that there is no shame in what they did together but it must never be repeated.  Emboldened by his first sexual triumph, Laurent rushes off to Hélène's room but she refuses point-blank to allow him into her bed.  The boy has more success with Daphne, but on returning to his own room the following morning he is alarmed to see that his father and older brothers have come to pay him a visit.  Realising that their secrets are safe, Laurent and Clara join in the laughter in what appears to be a happy family reunion.