Louis Malle, 1971
So I've been thinking a lot about children for no particularly good reason lately. And I was talking about the possibility of having a son, and how I imagine it could be a very strange lonely experience. Because if you're a woman and you have a girl you assume (and of course not at all rightly) that you will form an intense intimate bond with that child. Whereas with a son a (potential) mother imagines a period of closeness followed by a growing sad distance.
When I watched this film I was kind of encouraged to see teenage boys who seemed to genuinely like their mom and want to hang out with her. And I thought to myself, "Well, this doesn't seem so bad."
And then things took a turn. I'm really hesitant to give away the ending; I guessed it based on the Netflix description bur I think it's better if you don't know. But I think this movie's reputation rests on this plot development and you've probably already guessed it. I will say this: the story develops in a very natural way because Malle never forgets that relationships are fundamentally about people with needs looking to have those needs met. The film succeeds because Malle does the emotional work rather than forcing his characters into tropes or frameworks.
One of the best and mist edifying chapters in From Reverence to Rape, Molly Haskell's highly influential book on women in the movies, is the one titled The Europeans, focusing on continental cinema. That chapter really shook me, because in it Haskell quite effectively that while we tend to view the Europeans wad more sophisticated people and finer filmmakers, in fact the scope of women's roles in their films are more limited. The frequent presence of the older worldly woman seems like a promising at first, but then we see she only exists to initiate the young male protagonist into the mysteries of sex and then gets discarded.
Of course this story has a tradition extending backwards far before cinema; nevertheless we can sort of take Malle to task for treating the mother (played by Lea Massari, 11 years after she played the girl who disappeared in L'Avventura) in very much this fashion. But even directors have the intention of portraying women like this, and even if they devote all their concern and energy into doing so (two big Ida), actors prove slippery creatures and can often get away with murder. For example, in My Night at Maud's (a film Haskell cites), Jean-Loui Tritignant may revel in his priggish self-assurance at performing the grand gesture of not sleeping with Maud, but it is the image of her in that sailor's shirt, smiling wryly and it's clear to us that she's the real victor because she's drawn the curtain back and revealed the game as bullshit. And, like Belmondo in A Woman is a Woman, you never worry about her, because someone so wonderfully warm and open can't be lonely for long.
I know what you're thinking. You can only defend Maud by saying you like looking at her in her sexy sailor's shirt. Objectification! Halting the narrative! Male gaze! I say: yes she's sexy and that's part if why I like looking at her and find her powerful. But feminist theory makes a mistake in isolating sex, assuming it occurs in a vacuum. The power that gets projected is not solely sexual, a thousand other strands are woven in there, and as they reach out to us they suggest stories beyond what we see, putting our imaginations into overdrive.
Though she's not as sophisticated or as wonderful as Francoise Fabian in Maud, Massari achieves something similar in Murmur. Too often sexiness, especially Italian sexiness, comes in the extremes of indifferent aloofness or va-va-voom, almost comedic, shimmy. More so than even Sophia Loren (at least as far as I've seen) Massari here personifies the word "earthy." Her sexiness is a sexiness of the earth, it's grounded and predicated upon authenticity rather than performance. It's sexiness with lots of laughing, which I always like. And of course because she is both mother and object of desire, her sexual appeal goes hand in hand with comfort and familiarity, which I found rather sweet, in spite (or perhaps because?) of the squicky place things go.
Oh what the heck, let's give up the ghost on not spoiling the surprise: Did the ending freak you out, and if so, did you feel like an uptight American prude when that happened. I have to admit when I first saw it, years of listening to Loveline kicked in and I thought: "This will cause incredible trauma!" But then the possibility that it might not be all that big a deal struck me as incredibly liberating, anarchic even. It reminded me in a sort of roundabout fashion, of the ending of Fat Girl, where young Anais tells the police nobody raped her as a way of negating victimhood. Back to Murmur, the end scene with the laughing bothered me, not so much because it sanctions what happens earlier but because it felt like an ending Malle tacked on because he was too scared or lazy to wrap up storylines. On further reflection, though it does have a sweet "no more yielding but a dream" quality to it, n'est-ce pas?
If we could go back to objectification for a moment (I know, I know, but it's sort of my pet peeve, bear with me) I've never seen why, if done well, it has to be eliminated entirely. After all, we do project and objectify in real life -- most especially when it comes to love -- so why shouldn't we represent this phenomenon on celluloid? If we have a film where the protagonist is a 14-year-old boy, why shouldn't we see women the way he sees them? (The answer would probably come back: because the adolescent male view of women is pretty much the de facto perspective in Hollywood and nobody else can get an eyeball in edgewise. To which I say "Amen, sister.")
Here again the fact that mother and lover are actually the same person makes objectification even more appropriate for the story; for both boys and girls, mothers are shrouded in iconic mysteries. Malle gives Massari the opportunity to shed some of this through the revelation of personal details, but the revelation of mother as fragile woman simultaneously strips aura an re-enshrouds her as love/lust object. In spite of that laughing ending and her general likability, the audience sees something dark and perverse: a woman so thoroughly conditioned by society, forced to fend for herself at such an early age, and currently so thoroughly alienated that she knows only one way of communicating with and getting things from a man, even when that man is her own son. Even though I like Clara better as a person, it reminds me of Betty Draper's relationship with the Bishop kid.
In fact if you wanted to, you could call Murmur Mad Men's older French cousin, who's been put on mood stabilizers that are sort of working. Both are set in repressive past eras. (Here the wonderful Michael Lansdon, probably best known to American audiences as Papa in Munich, plays an ever-so-slightly pervy priest.) Murmur also pokes holes in bourgeois propriety and hypocrisy, but more comically, in the incident where Laurent's brothers replace the Corot painting in the salon with a forgery and then slash the copy to bits in front of their horrified family. (Corot must have some kind of special significance for the French bourgeoisie; in Summer Hours, two Corots are the pieces the professor brother is most desperate to save.) Tonally the two differ greatly, but the scenes between the children and the long-suffering maid Gusta reminded me of the scenes with Carla in Mad Men in how incisively they contour with so little material. But while he pokes and prods, for Malle ultimately embraces the bourgeois milieu as a site of laughter, not alienation. We could go so far as to say that stylistically, Murmur is a thoroughly bourgeois piece: comfortable, competent, aesthetically pleasing without being too challenging.
I haven't talked at all about Benoit Ferreux, who really does a terrific job as our young hero. He looks startlingly like a baby wilderness, sometimes displaying a great tenderness and precocity, sometimes all feral impulse. He perfectly captures the war between his more sensitive nature and the rage of hormones going on inside him.
On a side note I just want to say I totally fell in love with Francois Werner, who played Laurent's snobbish, twerpy royalist friend Hubert. Here we see the antecedent of Max Fischer from Rushmore. According to IMDb he never made another film. Quel dommage.
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