Le Souffle au coeur = Dearest love = Murmur of the Heart

Laurent (Benoit Ferreux) is the fourteen year old youngest son of a rich bourgeois provincial doctor (Daniel Gelin). It is 1954, the French are still involved in Vietnam, the hardships of the war years are in the past, and for Laurent, who is endlessly pampered by his adoring mother (Lea Massari) and two oldest brothers, life is very sweet indeed. Louis Malle’s “Le Souffle au Coeur” is a surprisingly acerbic comedy about the privileges and causal amoralities of the middle class. The surprise is in how tender Malle is towards the sexual and physical experiences of adolescence. Masturbation, virginity, initiation to prostitution, incestuous feelings; all are treated with a gentle mockery that strips them of fetishism or gross perversity. In fact, it is selfishness of wealth that is the real perversity in this intoxicating film. When young Laurent finally gives expression to his sexual desire for his beautiful girlish mother, we are treated to one of the few moments in cinema history where incest is treated not with terror or with guilt but as part of the animal instincts of the human animal. Undoubtedly, Malle’s intention was to focus on the social and economic conditions that gave rise to the massive bourgeois protests of the late 1960s, however he refuses to make his wicked family monstrous or to scapegoat them entirely for the faults of their class. Laurent, his brothers and his parents are oblivious to any of the darkness that exists in the world around them. “Le Souffle au Coeur” which could be subtitled “Memoirs of a Catholic Childhood” is one of the most refreshingly secular films ever made. (PLEASE NOTE: THIS ENGLISH SUBTITLED PRINT HAS BEEN SLIGHTLY CENSORED BECAUSE OF THE CONTROVERSIAL NATURE OF THE MATERIAL). In French with English subtitles. NATURE OF )