Word: murmurings
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...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...
Taking these discoveries seriously, we expect to see their complex effects on the boy, and indeed there is at least one: he develops a heart-murmur while away from his mother at scout camp. The sudden illness separates him from an ardently admiring young friend and sends him home to be nursed by Mama. The doctor's prescription, conveniently enough, is a rest-cure at Bourbon Les Bains, a typically French resort for the well-to-do where the guests nurse their hypochondria with daily doses of mineral water and gossip. At the baths, Mother's attempts at strict motherliness...
...this point in the film, a middle-aged man across the aisle leaned in my direction and whispered authoritatively, "Excellent, excellent." He was pleased with Malle's treatment of incest, and with good reason. Murmur plays a traditionally tragic theme in a nostalgically comic key, and proves it can be done with perfect taste, intelligence, and close attention to fleeting emotion. If our notions of the destructive effects of the inevitable disillusionment and sexual confusion of adolescence are too much influenced by the Joyces, Lawrences, and Hesses of this world, then Malle gently insists that it doesn't have...
Without the enticing presence of Malle's understated heresy, Murmur could easily be relegated to the ranks of the pleasant comedies the French have such a reputation for. As it is, (let's be frank) Malle succeeds better with his Gallic charm (Excellent!) than with his tour-deadolescent-psychology. These strange bedfellows make an engaging couple only as far as they can be reconciled into a single film...
...disability is more common among interns, residents and assistant department chiefs than it is among new medical students and professors. The symptoms are easily recognized. In a typical case, the chief of a hospital service will examine a patient and announce that he hears, for instance, a heart murmur. None of the interns or residents accompanying him can detect it until the senior resident-who has much influence over the trainees' futures-announces: "I hear it." Then the disease spreads rapidly. One after another, the members of the chief's party will report that they too hear...