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MovieMail's Review
Louis Malle embraced controversy from the outset of his directorial career and, as this second collection of his finest work shows, he remained a courageous auteur to his tragically early death.
With its emphasis on incest, the holier-than-thou brigade had a field day with Le Souffle au Coeur (1971). Indeed, the brief, tender moment towards the end of this fond and often amusing exposé of mid-50s bourgeois mores distracted many from the sensitivity and insight of this typically Mallean rites-of-passage study, in which Benoît Ferreux and Lea Massari excel as the curious Dijon teenager and his flirtatious mother.
However, with Lacombe, Lucien (1974), Malle aroused considerably more ire by reopening the wounds left by the Nazi Occupation of France. His crime was a refusal to take sides in the Maquis-Vichy debate by presenting Pierre Blaise's farm boy as a victim of his times rather than the incarnation of wickedness. But, such was the outcry, that Malle was forced to work abroad for the next 13 years.
It was to his credit, therefore, that his semi-autobiographical homecoming feature, Au Revoir, Les Enfants (1987), revisited wartime themes. Determined to confound notions of clear-cut heroism and villainy, Malle showed innocents and collaborators alike taunting the Fontainbleau Jewry, while priests and soldiers tried to defend them. This depiction of a society failing to realise the full enormity of its hideous plight was received with a much greater sense of national self-awareness.
This splendid selection also includes a couple of less contentious offerings, the muddled post-apocalyptic saga, Black Moon (1975), and the droll blend of domestic discord and political satire, Milou en Mai (1990).
Five films from director Louis Malle, one of the most interesting and talented of all the French auteurs. Features Black Moon (1975): A surreal, apocalyptic film that recalls a warped Alice In Wonderland. Milou En Mai (1990): Malle's last French film - Set the student demonstrations in May 1968, a family gathers in a large villa following the death of an elderly relative. Lacombe Lucien (1974): A bored teenager, rejected by the Resistance, joins the Gestapo instead, developing a flair for the work. Le Souffle Au Coeur (Murmur Of The Heart) (1971): Depicting incidents in the sexual development of a teenage boy, this is Malle at his most engaging and amusing. Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987): Based on his friendship with a Jewish boy at boarding school, Malle's film is a withering critique of the petty hatreds of a society which called itself civilized, and is arguably his masterpiece.
