Murmur of the Heart
(1971)
★ 7 IMDb · 220 votes
Year: 1971
Runtime: 118 мин
Country: France, Germany
Director: Louis Malle
Cast: Lea Massari, Benoît Ferreux, Marc Winocourt, Fabien Ferreux, Daniel Gélin, Майкл Лонсдейл, Ave Ninchi, Annie Savarin, Gila von Weitershausen, Micheline Bona
Plot
This loosely plotted coming-of-age tale follows the life of 15-year-old Laurent Chevalier as he stumbles his way over the burgeoning swell of adolescence in 1950s France. After having his first sexual experience with a prostitute and dodging the lips of a priest, Chevalier contracts a case of scarlet fever. When the fever leaves him with a heart murmur, Chevalier is placed in a sanatorium, along with his over-attentive and adulterous mother.
This is a jolly coming-of-age story about a 14-year-old boy named Laurent Chevalier who is growing up in bourgeois surroundings in Dijon, France. This is France in the mid-1950s rather than America in the 1990s. Thus, Laurent is unharmed by events which would irreparably shatter the self-esteem of a modern American adolescent: he gets drunk, he smokes, he has sex, he is smothered by his mother, he is ignored by his father, a priest makes a pass at him, he gets rheumatoid fever, etc. There's enough scandalous behavior in this film to make 100 made-for-TV movies, and yet this is a very happy and oddly innocent tale.