Word: laurent
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Incest is the issue in Louis Malle's new comedy, even though the film manages to reach an ending that has all the simple-minded cheeriness of an updated Gallic episode of Leave it to Beaver. Witness: 15-year-old Laurent Chevalier, shoes in hand, tiptoes into his room after spending the night with a new girl-friend. He freezes when he spots, waiting for him in the room, his two older brothers and his father--whose threatening look demands an explanation for his son's absence. While Laurent is still standing in awkward silence, his mother enters, sizes...
...laughter so easy in such a difficult situation? It isn't that The Murmur of the Heart is the kind of comedy that permits easy nonsequiturs, and it isn't that the advent of Laurent's girl-friend is preferable for everyone concerned to Laurent's incestuous leanings toward his mother. That laughter is by no means inevitable within the context of the film, but Malle's real point is the film's peculiar anti-Romantic heresy. Subtly suggesting the possibility of all kinds of psychological traps for its intelligent and very sensitive adolescent hero (including homosexuality, transvestism, a penchant...
...reasons the tricky subject matter of the film never becomes too-hot-to-handle comically. In the first place, Laurent's mother is utterly unable to assume a mother's role: she is beautiful, young, and childlike, a capricious Italian woman who married at 16 and who has never quite learnt the ways of the French. The comfortable amorality of upper-middle-class Dijon in 1954 also serves to lighten the mood of the film. The Chevalier home is a place of hard-working servants, white tablecloths, and wine-filled crystal; original paintings are on the walls, the Tour...
...midst of it all, Laurent's precocity impresses almost everyone: he writes fine essays on Camus and on suicide for his teacher at school, wins his mother's heart with his advanced sensitivity, and delights his brothers by adeptly following in their not-quite-rakish footsteps. He only manages to annoy his conservative father because of his lack of table-manners...
Malle manages the technical side of his scenario with facility. There are funny moments in the classroom and at home when Laurent and his brothers torment the family maid. Malle, however, seeks to banish the Oedipal shadows that cloud his story by turning almost everything into comedy. Instead of forming an ironic counterpoint to the dark psychology of the story, safe and easy laughter trivializes it, stifling the pain of true recall...