好奇心

路易·马勒，大师级的导演，讲述着50年代法国性解放的时代。战争、殖民地、妥协、宗教、自由、性爱，让《好奇心》烙刻上那个年代固有的一切标志与特征。

一个富有家庭里的青春期孩子，在沉腐的天主教气氛和严厉的家族管教之下学着叛逆。读加缪的书，听爵士乐，想象自己的第一次。其实一切都很正常，可为什么故事发展的一种结局会是乱伦呢？唯一的想法是，这并不是导演要求我们所关注的，或许他更倾向于让观众注视人与人之间的交流，或者在一个大环境下的少年的心路历程。但作为观众之一的我又不得不关注，似乎弗洛伊德笔下的俄狄浦斯式的恋母情结是一个难以解开的死穴。本片的大胆亦在于在思想的层面之下，主人公最终终于付诸了行动，而这种行动并非所谓的抵抗或僭越等一系列恶毒的东西，而是如最后所说的美好的东西。当成长的需求遇到伦理的规章，哪方会获胜呢？而当事情真的发生，这个生命中永久保存的部分将会演变成什么？我们不得而知。

一个有才华的，典型的中产阶级家庭长大的小男孩。有着与其他同龄少男少女一样的好奇心。
    而且这些好奇与尝试仅仅是认识世界的一个过程而已。
    尽管有着强烈的好奇心，但是，我猜他最终的人生轨迹应该会是如他父亲一样的成功且循规蹈矩。
    只是少年时期的短暂回忆罢了。影片结尾说明了一切。
    
    

俄狄浦斯之过

《好奇心》 Le souffle au coeur 年代：1971年 / 国家：法国、意大利、西德 / 导演：路易·马勒 / 主演： 贝努阿·费雷、蕾雅·马萨利

     电影大师贝托鲁奇在《月神》中将性欲引入了母子关系的沟壑中，尽管还不能跟后来的《爱情的限度》《欲孽迷宫》等影片惊世骇俗的场面化相提并论，但这种超越世俗伦常的情感至今争议不断，也成为电影大师频繁染指的题材。比如法国新浪潮的代表人物之一路易·马勒，就执导了这部《好奇心》。通过一个叛逆小子罗伦特对母亲的依恋之情，对人性进行了深入探讨。15岁的他做过很多疯狂事，跟两个哥哥喝酒飙车、在派对上跟女孩接吻、偷读成人书刊，甚至哥哥找了妓女来给他“破处”。对于性，大人们始终觉得这是可耻的“肮脏事”，神父就曾让他戒掉手淫，说这是“邪恶的念头”，然而这位道貌岸然的神父却是同性恋，对罗伦特抚摸下手。同样，当母亲发现儿子正在偷看自己洗澡时，上去就是一个耳光，但母亲也还是没能抵挡住对欲望的索求，在跟16岁少年有交往之后，又跟自己的儿子爆发了激情。有人说每个男人都有恋母情结，或者说是弑父情结，就像罗伦特怀疑自己是否是父亲的亲生儿子，但影片没有贬低和矮化这种感情，全家人开怀大笑的结局尚存一丝狡黠，洒了一地的牛奶其实也就象征着，罗伦特还只是个孩子而已。
    抛开这些伦理层面的探讨，影片其实是有深刻的政治隐喻。影片的故事背景发生在第四共和国时期，通过人物对话可知，日内瓦会议刚刚结束，法国在印度支那地区停战。而影片拍摄时的1971年，美国正在对越南（曾经的印度支那地区）进行侵略战争。路易·马勒用一个男孩“越界”的行为，含蓄而隐晦地对美国的“越界”行为进行谴责。

笑点
    第11分钟，罗伦特的两个哥哥露出自己的小弟弟，炫耀各自的“长度”。不服输的罗伦特“欲与天公试比高”，还拿出尺子跟哥哥们量起来了。男生最隐秘的部位，恰恰是男性自尊的根源所在，这一点在孩童时代就已经显现出来了。



骇点
   第110分钟，罗伦特将喝醉的母亲扶上床，脱掉了她的外衣，汹涌而来的欲望让他忽略了亲情关系，情不自禁地跟母亲缠绵了起来。周围安静地可怕，仿佛这件事发生地不知不觉，也应该被就此抹去一样。事后，母亲跟罗伦特说“它永远不会再发生。”之后，罗伦特把未泄的激情发在了另一个女孩身上。
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Murmur of the Heart: All in the Family
By Michael Sragow

Murmur of the Heart (1971), Louis Malle’s comic masterpiece, is the most American of great French films. Indeed, with its youthful charm and rebellion, the film feels even more characteristically American than the mature and elusive masterpieces Malle went on to direct in America—Atlantic City, in 1980; My Dinner with Andre, the following year; and Vanya on 42nd Street, in 1994. From the start of his career, aspects of U.S. culture had always brought a special resonance to Malle’s movies: a Miles Davis soundtrack ignites Elevator to the Gallows (1957); the tiny heroine of Zazie dans le métro (1960) buys American jeans; the suicidal hero of The Fire Within (1963) chooses F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to be the final thing he reads. But Malle continually carbonates Murmur of the Heart with a Yankee-flavored fizz. Jazz by Charlie Parker and others fills the soundtrack. Visual and verbal references to American popular culture abound. Most importantly, Malle’s free-for-all view of haute-bourgeois family life has an American-style spontaneity and rambunctiousness. The adolescents in this film may be chic, but they’re iconoclastic, too. And even though the movie depicts psychologically charged material—including incest—that would normally resist comic handling, Malle gives the whole shebang a crackpot symmetry worthy of Hollywood screwball comedy at its peak.

Murmur of the Heart was, in fact, a turning point for Malle—or, rather, the turning point after a turning point. Malle emerged into world cinema seemingly full-grown, as a sleek craftsman boasting a rangy intelligence and stylistic invention and audacity. Whether codirecting Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s marine documentary The Silent World (1956); creating an inspired erotic update of an eighteenth-century short story (The Lovers [1958], from “No Tomorrow,” by Vivant Denon); or keenly rendering modern classics (Zazie dans le métro, from Raymond Queneau’s novel), Malle appeared to be the kind of director who became “personal” by melding his sensibility with that of a primary author. (Even Elevator to the Gallows comes from a thriller by Noel Calef.)

Yet his best movies pivoted on signature moments of violent or chaotic release—there was always a volatile temperament simmering under that virtuoso surface. After the frolic of Viva Maria! (1965) and the period adaptation The Thief (1966), however, Malle began to worry that he might become a cliché: one more accomplished French director putting out a worthy picture every year. Mentally blocked from tackling, head-on, autobiographical material or incendiary political subjects, yet too antsy and ambitious to settle into complacent professionalism, Malle took an extraordinary step. In 1968, without any set shooting plan or preconceived notions, he journeyed to India with a soundman and a cameraman, submerged himself in the society and the culture, and came out with the material for the theatrical documentary Calcutta (1969) and the seven-part TV series Phantom India (1969). “I think this experience of relying on my instincts was quite decisive in my work,” Malle told Philip French, in the early nineties. “I’ve always tried to rediscover the state of innocence that I found so extraordinary working in India.”

This new reliance on hunch and intuition empowered Malle to reach further down into himself and confront his most intimate concerns. It would take him years to relate, in Au revoir les enfants (1987), the wartime trauma that had haunted him since childhood—the Nazis’ arrest of a Jewish classmate posing as a gentile in Malle’s Catholic boarding school. But starting with Murmur of the Heart, he began operating as an archaeologist of his own heart, putting together insights and observations from every era that he had lived through and exposing his own most personal reactions to fraught or perilous circumstances. The complexity of his portrait of a young French collaborator in World War II, Lacombe, Lucien (1974), derives as much from his earlier, aborted attempt to grapple with his countrymen’s colonial battles in Algiers (in 1962, at age thirty, he spent twenty-four hours in a fortress in east Algeria, then found the subject too incendiary) as it does from his experiences as a boy in occupied France.

What’s remarkable about Malle’s portraits of youth—what allows him to tap bottomless wells of humor and pathos—is that they’re both empathetic and pitiless. Zazie is a one-girl youth movement, as exhausting as she is exhilarating. The movie dares you to keep up with her, and Malle’s artistry transforms it into a happy challenge. Lucien Lacombe swings almost arbitrarily from potential Resistance fighter to collaborator, from coexecutioner to savior of his Jewish lover and her grandmother; we eventually see him as an overgrown feral child. Malle is ruthlessly objective about his alter ego in Au revoir les enfants, right up to the moment when his furtive glance at his Jewish pal reveals the lad’s identity to the Nazis—who, of course, would have caught the poor boy anyway.

Murmur of the Heart offers an unusually full and individualized characterization of a boy whose yearnings, sensitivities, and fantasies outstrip his personality—the sort of unformed figure that creators less bold, candid, or inventive than Malle would never dare to present as their surrogate. The director told French that the setup for Murmur of the Heart was autobiographical: “My passion for jazz, my curiosity about literature, the tyranny of my two elder brothers, how they introduced me to sex—this is pretty close to home. And when I got this heart murmur, the doctors said to my mother, ‘You have to take him to this spa, that’s the best thing you can do.’” For “bizarre” reasons, they did end up sharing the same room. But everything else was invented, including the details of growing up in the 1950s, during the French downfall in Indochina, engendered by Dien Bien Phu. (Malle, of course, grew up in the 1930s and ’40s.)

Still, the atmosphere in Murmur of the Heart is hyperrealistic. It’s seductive and hilarious, as well, because of the warmth and unexpected eccentricity of the moviemaker’s observations. Malle’s fourteen-year-old hero, Laurent (played by Benoît Ferreux), has a taste for Albert Camus that upsets his Catholic schoolteachers and a yen for jazz that helps him bebop to a different drummer. Ferreux offers the perfect image for Laurent: his legs seem too long for his body, and his head too big for it; his expressions of mischief and of petulance, or even rage, are all equally beguiling. The whole movie is built on Laurent’s inchoate nature and the way it makes him, as his adoring mother puts it, unpredictable. Malle doesn’t commit the error of setting him too far apart from the other children in his class, or from his frolicsome older brothers. But the director gets across how Laurent’s imagination imbues him with more vulnerability and awareness, and also more charisma, than the others. (You can see why a little blond boy develops an innocent crush on him.)

A lot of Laurent’s distinctiveness comes out in the writing. Malle hands him lines replete with deadpan derision, and Ferreux delivers them with innocent insouciance—as though he were the first freshman or sophomore to discover the pleasures of the put-down. He’s funny when urging a recalcitrant record-shop owner (from whom he’s just shoplifted) to donate money “for France,” to support the wounded in Indochina. He’s funnier when outraging propriety-obsessed mothers at a spa by telling them that all of their daughters are lesbians, and that one of their sons told him so. But just as much of Laurent’s infectious quality comes from his off-kilter visual impression. His gangling, thin-stemmed coltishness doesn’t quite keep pace with the determined-to-be-cool looks that steal across his shrewd, observant, sometimes bemused face.

Laurent and his brothers mesh with their mother, Clara (Leá Massari), more than they do with their gynecologist father, Dr. Charles Chevalier (Daniel Gélin). The movie rebuts the Father Knows Best caricatures that have pervaded bourgeois pop culture everywhere; Malle knows that, in even the most pretentious families (perhaps in those especially), the wife and servants and sons know Father’s strengths and limitations all too well. The name Dr. Chevalier, with its reference to the lowest rank of the French Legion of Honor, mocks upper-middle-class social aspirations. He’s proud of a Corot he found in the attic; but his eldest sons have it forged, just for the elation of knowing that their old man can’t tell the difference between the original and the copy, which leads to a delicious, heart-stopping practical joke. Yet the father isn’t an ignoble man. He’s just resigned beyond his years.

With the vibrant Massari giving one of the great performances of the seventies, Clara is the character who, along with Laurent, dominates the household and the film. This passionate Italian, who grew up as the daughter of a rebellious father, says she fell for Chevalier because, with a beard, he looked like Garibaldi. She’s got a voracious appetite for sensual pleasure and freedom. She can’t help treating her sons as playmates; when she discovers them filching her money, the result is nothing more serious than a game of monkey-in-the-middle, played in her bedroom, with her as the monkey. When Laurent first discovers that Clara has a lover, he’s stricken. He runs to his father, who shoos him out of the office before he can say anything. With his heart and mind in turmoil, he’s further confused when his brothers pay for his initiation into sex with a friendly, compliant prostitute, and then, in a drunken prank, pull him off prematurely. The murmur of the heart in the title is literally the heart murmur that Laurent develops after a fever, but metaphorically it stands for the way that a sensitive adolescent’s life can seem to skip a beat. (Fittingly, the English title for Jacques Audiard’s engaging remake of James Toback’s seminal Fingers—the tale of an adolescent arrested in extremis—was The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Might Audiard have had Malle in mind, too?) Laurent and Clara move ever closer to each other during his convalescence. They go off to a spa, where they’re forced to share close quarters because of a mistake in booking. They turn from mother and son, or even friends, to soul mates. She recognizes his frustration as he comes on to a couple of pretty young patients, while he gets nearer than he wants to one of her final liaisons with her lover. For mother and son, their inebriated celebration of Bastille Day becomes a time of emotional liberation. They make love in the least incestuous incest scene imaginable. There’s no Bertolucci-like portentousness. Malle doesn’t treat it as a taboo—he ties it too closely to the needs and dreams of a drunken, amorous woman who’s still dizzy from her breakup with her lover, and of a drunken, amorous teenager who has grown to understand the emotional needs behind her adultery. Rather than set off damaging psychic depth charges, the experience gives Laurent an unexpected shot of virility. Almost immediately afterward, he goes on a night prowl for those two girls, and gets lucky with one of them. That’s true to the extroverted spirit of the whole movie. Malle doesn’t merely ridicule the clannishness and cliquishness of middle-class life; he turns those qualities inside out. The home-as-castle conservatism of the father joins with the anything-goes fervor of the mother to give their kids a springboard resilience. When they carry on like spoiled brats, playing “spinach tennis” at the dinner table while their parents are away, or rolling up the rugs for a dance party, they aren’t just being fresh—they’re filling the house with fresh air.

In Murmur of the Heart, Malle’s own zest connects with the knockabout wit and curiosity of his adolescent antiheroes. He sketches even the jokey supporting parts with a satiric sort of sympathy—like the youthful snob Hubert (François Werner), who thinks it’s classy and worldly to defend colonialism. From the fleshy warmth of Ricardo Aronovich’s cinematography to the jazz percolating in Laurent’s brainpan—and, thanks to Malle, in ours—the movie boasts the high spirits to match its high intelligence. Murmur of the Heart is the opposite of a problem comedy about incest. For one thing, incest is not a problem here. Incest is the trapdoor that swings up to reveal the turbulence beneath a cozy way of life—and, in doing so, betrays the growing appetite for candor of a towering twentieth-century artist.

Michael Sragow has been the lead critic of the Baltimore Sun since 2001

人们可以彼此尊重到什么程度？

电影里的男孩儿纵容了妈妈的外遇，心里也老大不乐意。但是他依然将这一切容忍，他和美丽的母亲结成了同盟——

“无论你做什么，我都会支持你。”

我把它理解为“尊重”——尊重你心爱的人的自由，尊重你心爱的人的爱情，尊重你心爱的人的心愿。但是请注意这个人是你的家人是你的爹妈是你的血亲。

还假装无动于衷呢。
要是纯嫉妒也不对，那是男孩的父亲该做的事儿，即使他自己也确实在嫉妒——

“你像个小丈夫，法兰西小丈夫！”她妈妈这样笑他。

关键是，男孩儿并没把这些事儿视为“背叛”，这一切反倒成为他和他漂亮老妈之间推心置腹的资本。
什么恋母啊什么乱伦啊我也懒得去探究了，我只是好奇他们的底线到底在哪里。
我觉得这种因爱而生的宠溺和纵容已经有些可怕，因为爱到连占有欲都不见了。即使他们是母子，他们也是独立的个体，互相尊重互不干涉。

这个男孩儿——噢，应该说这些男孩儿，他们教养良好，懂得优雅，精通叛逆。可以把隐私拿来当游戏。一个个还霸道傲慢的恰到好处。火候拿捏的神准，真可怕。

我看不到底线，他们都无比优雅挺胸昂头的活着。这多么好。
也多么让人难过。

积压许久未看的片目之一，浮躁的心情绝对无法承受法国新浪潮，阅片无数才逐渐形成挑片品味，现在已受不了节奏缓慢的法国片做派，想当初买的一堆文艺片还真是后悔。影片主题就是一个怀春少年如何从生理到心理逐渐开苞的过程，显而易见的恋母情结，暧昧的乱伦情愫，离经叛道的事法国人看来还真怡然自得，Louis Malle这出戏唯一给我的好感就是顽劣少男萌动期的细节拿捏得到位，不少情境都是过来人能莞尔一笑的回忆。