[tps_title]7. Murmur of the Heart (Louis Malle, 1971)[/tps_title]
This spot could just as easily be occupied by Malle’s 1987 masterwork Au Revoir les Enfants, but I chose Murmur of the Heart because it is the stranger film, and therefore embodies a particular teenage condition especially well. Benoît Ferreux’s Laurent personifies that condition totally: gangly, gauche, and mischievous, he is a febrile tangle of libido and imprudence, a jazz-loving, cigar-smoking enfant terrible who parties through a series of slightly off-kilter coming-of-age rites before landing in bed with, who else, his mother. The Oedipal subtext is twisted into an irreverent comic misadventure with poignant undertones; admittedly, the results are more than a little unsettling. But such is the often surreal, sometimes perverse odyssey of adolescence, and by the end of the film, all Laurent or anyone else can do is laugh.
See also: Other Malle film mentioned in paragraph, as well as Deep End (1970) and Stand by Me (1986)
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