Take One (Jul-Aug 1971)

this within hailing distance of those deadly sins which used to form the archly cautionary substance of entire French features. Aside from one or two fugitive letters in Le Monde objecting to incest in general, though, the shock effect of Malle’s film has been mild. In part this seems the result of the implications most readily drawn from the director/scenarist’s treatment of the event itself. Far from traumatizing the sensitive young adolescent who occupies the film’s center, the incest in question both propels him into the adult world and reconciles the entire family unit. Sleeping with one’s mother is not productive of a symbolic wound which alienates and exiles; rather, it intensifies the unity and significance of familial experience. Incest thus becomes demystified, and taboos are placed at the service of a bourgeoisie whose earlier presence in the film has been shown as brutal and stultifying. At first glance Le Souffle Au Coeur falls within the symbolically gallic subgenre which treats of a young man and his maturing sensibility. Here the setting is Dijon of the mid-1950s, the social rank is upper-middle, and the boy in question is intellectually precocious. Laurent, at 14 the youngest son of a stuffy gynecologist and his youthful Italian wife (deftly played by Léa Massari), is moving beyond Camus on suicide even as the film opens. Just before he sleeps with his mother, he has reached The Story of O. Though still a sexual chrysalis, his tastes and opinions are fully developed and all on the right side — Bird and Monk, opposition to French policy in Indo-China — and this precociousness breeds in him a patrician acumen well suited to his family name of Chevalier. He is, then, the noble flower growing amongst the weeds of the upper-middle class. When he develops a slight heart condition and stays with his mother at a fashionable spa while taking a ‘‘cure,” their spiritual isolation from _ their coarser peers becomes objectified. No one else in their world is as sensitive and beautiful as they are, Malle tells us: their coupling is the natural consequence of their shared sensibilities. But Malle wants it the other way, too: denying the emotive logic of his plot, he wishes incest to be the vehicle whereby the understanding mother brings the wayward child once more within the family fold. Louis Malle’s best films treat the theme of flight, of a central character’s physical and psychic struggle — usually unsuccessful — to escape from a constricting environment. This design is the great legacy of Renoir and Bresson, and Malle shares it at various moments with others of his generation, especially Godard, Rivette and Truffaut. The bored bourgeoise of The Lovers escapes with her young student Joseph E. Levine presents a Mike Nichols Film starring Jack Nicholson: Candice Bergen © Technicolor Carnal Knowledge. Produced and Directed by Mike Nichols An Avco Embassy Release Panavision" o “l’ve experienced only three or four movies that I genuinely was sorry to see end. | was sorry to see’Camal Knowledge’ end.” “Camal Knowledge is one of the best movies ever.” “Camal Knowledge is brilliant. A feast of a film!” Mike Nichols, Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, Arthur Garfunkel, Ann-Margret and Jules Feiffer. UIAS] ‘3 UdasOr JADNPOIY BANNDAXI « JayjiIa4 Sain Aq Ua YaqIAS Pueudiy saubisag —Vincent Canby, New York Times —Liz Smith, Cosmopolitan Magazine —Judith Crist, N.Y. Magazine & An Avco Embassy Picture = > = = 1) yy =x S 5 = ie > S > ! < ® = a = oe) 5 @) ry) 5 os ~A 2) fe) = ® Q a O. = = D ao < Q © a fo) OQ < a Ps o O Zz © oy at. fe) Q fas Be fe) 3 AVAILABLE FROM || OC EMBASSY PICTURES 1301 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10019 ATT. CHARLES ROMANO (212) 956-6163/64 as if moving in a dream where all wishes are fulfilled. Less successful are the stylish thief of Le Voleur, weighted down by the meticulously rendered world of objects which he is impelled constantly to appropriate, and the wan café intellectual of Le Feu Follet who flees sanitariums and dinner parties only to find himself waiting round the corner. When Malle decided, in 1968, that he had to escape the particular environment within which his most recent films had been made, he turned to India, just as Renoir himself had done in similar circumstances almost two decades before. In Le Souffle Au Coeur this theme of flight has been reversed and almost parodied. At one point the young hero's drunken goon brothers literally pull him off the body of a motherly prostitute with whom they have arranged his defloration. The next scene shows Laurent packing, as if to leave home, but he is only off to Scout camp — with admonitions from the ancient, maternal maid to remember his undershirt. More fundamentally, the time spent with his mother at the spa would seem to constitute an escape from the restrictive attitudes of the family, with sex as the physical correlative of that adult world. In fact, his sexual initiation draws him ever more deeply within the 33