Murmur of the Heart

Set in Dijon in 1954, Murmur of the Heart follows Laurent Chevalier, a fifteen-year-old boy in a bourgeois family. His father, a respected doctor, keeps his distance, his older brothers treat him with a mix of affection and bullying, and his closest bond is with his young Italian mother, Clara. Laurent's encounters with sex and with a priest's attentions mark his passage through adolescence, and after he contracts scarlet fever the illness leaves him with a heart murmur that sends him, with Clara, to a health resort in the Morvan, where the social life is lively and where mother and son grow dangerously close.

Louis Malle directed and wrote the film, the sixth of the thirteen features he made in chronological order, arriving between Spirits of the Dead and Lacombe, Lucien. Lea Massari plays Clara, Benoît Ferreux plays Laurent, and Daniel Gélin and Michael Lonsdale appear among a credited cast of twenty-eight; Vincent Malle and Claude Nedjar produced. The film earned about a million dollars worldwide, a modest return. On IMDb it holds 7.5/10 from roughly 12,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 7/10 from about 220 votes. A critics' rating of 8.3/10 from eighteen reviews places it above both audience scores.