Category: Cinema

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion Spine #328: Louis Malle’s Mur­mur of the Heart.

In the Cri­te­ri­on-asso­ci­at­ed strange syn­er­gies of my life I’ve had two sep­a­rate works in two sep­a­rate days that replay the sto­ry of Oedi­pus and his moth­er in new fash­ions. First, Murakami’s Kaf­ka on the Shore, in which the 15 year old pro­tag­o­nist [might have] killed his father and def­i­nite­ly slept with his moth­er a few times and now Malle’s Mur­mur of the Heart in which the 14 year old main char­ac­ter has no love for his father and sleeps with his moth­er once. In these works, the rev­e­la­tion of the act is a precipice that allows for res­o­lu­tion. For me, the par­tic­u­lars aren’t impor­tant, but the man­ner of the rev­e­la­tion and the out­come of the act are. I don’t think this just applies to incest, but to any turn­ing point in a nar­ra­tive.

The man­ner and mech­a­nism is pre­med­i­tat­ed by the author. The out­come is the char­ac­ter’s reac­tion to what has occurred. Very dif­fer­ent func­tions.

In Mur­mur of the Heart, Malle uses a major­i­ty of the film to set-up an event that is noth­ing more than a sim­ple edit. Yet that cut has the force of near­ly two-hours of expo­si­tion behind it and is all the more pow­er­ful for its brevi­ty. For Lau­rent, it serves as a suc­cess­ful spring­board into adult­hood in a film filled with unsuc­cess­ful attempt after unsuc­cess­ful attempt. The film recalled Amer­i­can Beau­ty in form and func­tion, and while the Oedi­pal stuff is miss­ing from that film, the same mid­dle-class dis­sat­is­fac­tion that plagues Kevin Spacey’s char­ac­ter also fills Lau­ren­t’s moth­er. Her hus­band and her lover make no attempts to under­stand her, and Lau­rent seems to do so uncon­scious­ly. She comes to under­stand him and his under­stand­ing of her, and their love scene mir­rors this change; from a child and moth­er cud­dling, to a [n albeit] young man and a woman who love each oth­er.

It almost seems appro­pri­ate that Lau­rent, whose whole life has been guid­ed by his moth­er’s eye and his nascent adult­hood almost smoth­ered by her atten­tion is “made a man” by her. His agency becomes more and more focused as the film pro­gress­es, and after he final­ly com­pletes the sex act, he seems much more com­fort­able in his own skin. The film is per­me­at­ed with great jazz music [which has been sig­nif­i­cant­ly white­washed in recent times] that retains seeds of the shock­ing sex­u­al frank­ness and dan­ger that ear­ly jazz was asso­ci­at­ed with. The end result is a film that is a steady expo­si­tion of the pen­du­lous dan­gers of com­ing-of-age and also a strik­ing cri­tique of the inad­e­qua­cy of mid­dle-class fam­i­ly life.

• Cri­te­ri­on essay by Michael Sragow
• Offi­cial Louis Malle site