Murmur of the Heart (1971)

          The eclectic French director Louis Malle made comedies, character studies, documentaries, Hollywood movies, and provocative stories about sex. In fact, it’s often difficult to find a single authorial voice guiding his work. Somewhat like the American filmmaker John Huston, Malle was a curious intellectual who found a style to suit each project. Within Malle’s expansive filmography, however, certain movies contain aspects of veiled autobiography. For instance, Malle has said that Murmur of the Heart is a flight of fancy borrowing facts from his real life, whereas Au revoir les enfants (1987) re-creates actual events. In some ways, Murmur of the Heart is Malle’s most challenging film, owing equally to content and style. The style is episodic and loose, with a clear narrative purpose emerging only toward the end of the film’s running time. The content, put bluntly, is incest—played not for shock value but, unbelievably, for warmth.

          As did the young Louis Malle, 15-year-old Laurent (Benoit Ferreux) lives a privileged existence, grooving on American jazz records and savoring the doting attention of his beautiful mother, Clara (Lea Mssari). After various misadventures involving his brothers, including a colorful visit to a brothel, Laurent is diagnosed with a heart murmur. (This, too, happened to the real Malle.) Clara accompanies Laurent to a sanitarium, which is part medical facility and part vacation resort. Adding complexity to the situation is Laurent’s knowledge that Clara has been cheating on Laurent’s father. Concurrently, Clara encourages Laurent’s romance with a fellow patient at the sanitarium, a pretty young lady Laurent’s age. The end result of these events is that Laurent and Clara arrive at an unusual level of intimacy—they’re like best friends, each pushing the other to be his or her ideal self. One drunken evening, they express their intimacy in bed. Malle’s handling of the scene is remarkably sensitive and subtle, so the moment feels neither romanticized nor sensationalized. It simply happens, and it feels like the believable culmination of a unique relationship—a secret but not a sin.

          Although the way Malle threads this particular needle is the most unusual aspect of Murmur of the Heart, it’s but one of many fine things the filmmaker achieves. He depicts Laurent as a complex and dimensional individual, no small feat when portraying adults, to say nothing of young people, and he paints a vivid picture of life among the Gallic intelligentsia during the heyday of France’s Vietnam entanglement. Nothing in this movie is pat or tidy, so the piece sometimes feels unruly. And yet once Malle arrives at the critical moment, it’s clear he needed to travel down myriad pathways in order to explain the critical encounter. The great accomplishment of the film is helping viewers understand something that should, in the abstract, be incomprehensible. Better still, the film never asks viewers to make a value judgment; like all of Malle’s best movies, Murmur of the Heart illustrates the unexpected places that people go, asking the audience only for empathy.

Murmur of the Heart: GROOVY

Lacombe, Lucien (1974)

          The degree to which French filmmaker Louis Malle was shaped by his childhood experiences during World War II did not become clear until he made the shattering semiautobiographical drama Au revoir, les enfants (1987). Yet Malle’s deeply conflicted feelings about the wartime behavior of his countrymen is fundamental to Lacombe, Lucien, generally considered one of the triumphant achievements of the director’s career. Presented in a clinical style, the drama depicts a French teenager who becomes an operative of the German police force—or, according to the label hung on such people by history, a “collaborator.” Like most of Malle’s films, Lacombe, Lucien avoids simple conclusions and interpretations, even though the script (by Malle and Claude Nedjar) provides distinct milestones along the title character’s spiritual descent. Fitting a filmmaker who smoothly transitioned back and forth between documentaries and fiction films, Malle simply shows a pattern of conduct to the audience, allowing viewers to parse the underlying pathology and the troubling sociopolitical implications.

          When the story begins, 18-year-old Lucien (Pierre Blaise) is adrift, working as a janitor at the local school in his hometown and lazily indulging his incipient sadism by killing birds with a slingshot. Eager to give his life focus but not passionately drawn in any particular direction, Lucien tries to join the French anti-Nazi underground, but he’s rebuffed for being too young. Shortly afterward, circumstances bring Lucien into the orbit of Jean-Bernard (Stéphane Bouy), a high-ranking operative of the local collaborator cell. Sensing Lucien’s susceptibility, Jean-Bernard shows off his opulent headquarters—a luxury hotel that the Germans have confiscated. Liquor, money, and women are made available to Lucien in exchange for revealing what he knows about the underground.

          Yet even after Lucien sees a neighbor tortured based on information Lucien provided, the impressionable young man allows himself to get pulled deeper into Jean-Bernard’s web. Eventually, a moral conflict emerges when Lucien is introduced to Mr. Horn (Holger Löwendier), a Jewish tailor whom Jean-Bernard uses as a personal clothier. Lucien is infatuated not only by Mr. Horn’s sophistication but also by the tailor’s beautiful daughter, France (Aurore Clément). For a time, Lucien becomes an even worse monster than Jean-Bernard, insinuating himself into the Horn family by gunpoint. Then, as the impending arrival of American troops raises pressure on Germans and collaborators, Lucien must decide which allegiances are most important to him.

          On the surface, Lacombe, Lucien is deceptively simplistic because Malle eschews melodrama. Underneath, the movie is complex, disturbing, provocative, and perverse. For instance, Malle has Blaise play the leading role almost completely without affect—Lucien never laughs or smiles until the final sequence—so Lucien is like a blank canvas upon which others project their wartime attitudes. Therefore, when a collaborator says, “War has its good sides, too,” Lucien seems to agree. Yet when Mr. Horn tells Lucien, “Somehow I can’t bring myself to completely despise you,” that makes sense, as well. Lucien is cruel because he was given an opportunity to be cruel, so the troubling notion is that the same person, given a different set of circumstances, could have gone in the opposite direction. This nuanced perspective runs opposite to the usual good-vs.-evil paradigms associated with World War II. Accordingly, even though Lacombe, Lucien is quite long at 138 minutes—and often slowly paced—it’s hard to imagine the film having the same intellectual heft without any of its delicate components.

Lacombe, Lucien: GROOVY

Pretty Baby (1978)

          A peculiar film that attracted a fair measure of controversy during its original release, Pretty Baby is somewhat difficult to appraise, because even though it’s beautifully crafted and thoughtfully written, it’s also inherently sleazy. After all, the storyline is about a teenaged prostitute in 1917 New Orleans, complete with nude scenes by leading lady Brooke Shields, who was 12 years old when she made the picture. It’s impossible to fully justify the eroticizing of a child by saying that it’s germane to the story, because director/co-writer Louis Malle could have exercised more restraint and conveyed the same narrative. Therefore, one must ask whether Malle photographed Shields so lasciviously in service of a high purpose (challenging the audience to regard erotic images without experiencing an erotic reaction) or in service of a low purpose (pandering to the worst kind of male gaze). It’s not as if Pretty Baby approaches pornography in any way, but the film’s content is troubling.

          Anyway, the story is primarily set in a high-end brothel run by the aging but formidable Madame Nell (Frances Fay), who treats her working girls and support staff like family members. Because every woman in the house is expected to earn her keep, however, the prostitutes’ daughters are groomed to become working girls themselves. One such mother-daughter duo is Hattie (Susan Sarandon), an experienced whore anxious to quit the game, and Violet (Shields), who has just come of age. As the story progresses, Hattie becomes engaged to a client and agrees to move with him to St. Louis, while Violet is “sold” to her first client, a middle-aged man who pays $400 for the privilege of deflowering her. Meanwhile, a lanky photographer named Bellocq (Keith Carradines) starts hanging around the brothel to take pictures of the women, and he becomes infatuated with the beguiling but petulant Violet. Thus, after Hattie leaves for St. Louis with a promise to return for Violet someday, Bellocq takes Violet into his home as a live-in lover. All of this is set against a backdrop of social turmoil, because the New Orleans of this movie is rattled by protests that lead to prostitution becoming illegal.

          Demonstrating his signatures of a curious mind and an eye for detail, Malle tells the story clinically, as if it’s a re-creation of a historical event. (In fact, the story is wholly fictional, although the milieu it depicts certainly existed.) Pretty Baby is on some levels a survival story about young women in an era when people born into shameful circumstances had few social options, so it has some resonance as a feminist parable. The movie also has copious amounts of atmosphere, thanks to glorious costuming and production design, to say nothing of subtly textured cinematography by Sven Nykvist. (His images capture everything from the deceptively elegant interiors of the brothel to the sweltering humidity of New Orleans’ tree-choked suburbs.)

          As for the acting, it’s a bit uneven. Carradine and Sarandon are strong, as always, and supporting players including Antonio Fargas and Diana Scarwid add saucy flavors to the mix. Faye’s performance is stiff, but her physical presentation is so perfect for the role that her weak acting is easily overlooked. And then there’s Shields. It’s hard to say whether she’s genuinely performing or merely affecting a precocious attitude, but the combination of her delicate features and Violet’s gritty persona is potent. Ultimately, Pretty Baby is far too serious an endeavor to dismiss, though it’s a mystery why the film was made.

Pretty Baby: GROOVY

Black Moon (1975)

          French director Louis Malle’s only feature-length venture into surrealism, Black Moon is among the strangest movies released in the ’70s, even though it’s quite tame, in terms of content and style, when compared to the boldest sex-and-violence freakouts of the era. Instead of shock value, Malle opts for the weirdness usually found in the world of dreams, juxtaposing doomsday scenarios, mother fixations, paranoia, talking animals, and other loaded psychological signifiers. Viewers inclined to parse Black Moon for deeper meanings could write epic dissertations trying to analyze all of the aural and visual messages, and stoners could presumably groove on the wall-to-wall oddity. For viewers seeking narrative coherence, however, only consternation awaits.

          British actress Cathryn Harrison stars as Lily, a young woman driving through the French countryside and trying to avoid the warring parties in a violent armed conflict between men and women. Eventually abandoning her car, Lily spots a unicorn and follows the animal to an old estate, where she encounters several bizarre beings: an elderly woman (Therese Giehse) who conspires with mysterious colleagues via radio; a young handyman (Joe Dallesandro) and his beautiful sister (Alexandra Stewart), who barely ever speak; and a slew of animals, some of whom speak.

          While ostensibly trying to find the unicorn, and thereby prove she’s not crazy to think she saw the mythical animal, Lily slips into the peculiar life cycle of the estate. After watching Stewart’s character breast-feed the elderly woman, for instance, Lily helps out by breast-feeding the elderly woman when Stewart’s character is away. Black Moon is filled with images that might mean something, like the bit in which Lily berates the unicorn, which she eventually finds, for being overweight and ungraceful. The question is whether Black Moon actually generates enough excitement and interest to warrant investigation of its mysteries.

          On the plus side, the movie has a beautifully overcast look; revered cinematographer Sven Nykvist shot the picture in and around Malle’s real-life family estate, so there’s a palpable sense of old Europe’s earthiness and splendor. On the minus side, the lack of a strong narrative line makes the episodes comprising the picture feel random, as if Malle (who also produced and co-wrote the picture) transcribed a stream of consciousness instead of crafting a story. Still, for many viewers, anything out of the ordinary is noteworthy, and if there’s one thing Black Moon is not, that is ordinary. Moreover, the frequent critical parallels between this film and Alice in Wonderland are justified, so if you’re game for another trip down the rabbit hole, Black Moon will certainly take you there.

Black Moon: FREAKY