Movie Review - Murmur of the Heart
Le Souffle au coeur (1971)
directed by Louis Malle
rating: 2 out of 5 jalapeños
on DVD from Andy
I can't talk about how much I love French directors like Eric Rohmer without shying away from conversations about French movies like this one. You might never mistake a Rohmer movie for something not-Norman - action, action, ACTION you'll scream - but Rohmer's women and Rohmer's men will be recognizable to you. Lively, pretty, unhappy or glad.
Malle's boys are rich, and in "Murmur of the Heart," they slum it. They canoodle with prostitutes, with guests at the spa, they get drunk and sleep with their poor-born but affectionate Italian mother. It isn't a movie about growing up as much as it is a movie about growing up wealthy, so that none of the kids' freedoms feel like risks (as they are in, say, "The 400 Blows"), but entitlements of their unexceptional upbringings.
Nor does Malle try, in those scenes with mom, any Buñuelian surrealist gambol, or light-hearted ode to love's elemental open arms, because nothing in the movie's final scene suggests anything other than all three sons winding up proudly and precisely in their unbearable father's position and place, condescending with a grin to their own trendy anarchist broods.
directed by Louis Malle
rating: 2 out of 5 jalapeños
on DVD from Andy
I can't talk about how much I love French directors like Eric Rohmer without shying away from conversations about French movies like this one. You might never mistake a Rohmer movie for something not-Norman - action, action, ACTION you'll scream - but Rohmer's women and Rohmer's men will be recognizable to you. Lively, pretty, unhappy or glad.
Malle's boys are rich, and in "Murmur of the Heart," they slum it. They canoodle with prostitutes, with guests at the spa, they get drunk and sleep with their poor-born but affectionate Italian mother. It isn't a movie about growing up as much as it is a movie about growing up wealthy, so that none of the kids' freedoms feel like risks (as they are in, say, "The 400 Blows"), but entitlements of their unexceptional upbringings.
Nor does Malle try, in those scenes with mom, any Buñuelian surrealist gambol, or light-hearted ode to love's elemental open arms, because nothing in the movie's final scene suggests anything other than all three sons winding up proudly and precisely in their unbearable father's position and place, condescending with a grin to their own trendy anarchist broods.
posted by NPK at 7:50 AM
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