Murmur of the Heart · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two boys rattle a collection tin for the wounded of Indochina, then spend the take on a Charlie Parker record. Nobody in the film comments. It is the first real joke in Murmur of the Heart, and it lays out the terms: somewhere past the edge of the frame an empire is ending, Dien Bien Phu, headlines, a radio in another room, while the crisis in the foreground is whether Laurent Chevalier, fifteen, will lose his virginity before his brothers arrange it for him. Empire ends. Adolescence continues. Malle sets the two scales side by side and declines to rank them.

Deleuze had a useful distinction for what that offscreen war is doing. A frame can open onto the next room, which is ordinary. Or it can open onto something you could not walk to even if you left the house, a whole that keeps changing whether or not anyone looks. He called the second the absolute out-of-field. France's colonial collapse is never staged here. It is read aloud, half-heard, mixed into the wallpaper of 1954 Dijon along with the scout troop and the Jesuit school's rituals. It causes nothing in the plot. It just makes the plot smaller, and the film knows it.

Inside the house, the same principle at domestic scale. Deleuze's account of postwar cinema begins from a breakdown: in the older films someone perceives a situation and acts, and the act settles things. Afterward that circuit stops closing. One of the first symptoms he names is the dispersive situation — no protagonist and obstacle, just a scatter of people weakly attached to each other with no centre among them. Malle stages the Chevalier household exactly that way. Three brothers, two parents, servants and visitors circulate through the same rooms talking across one another, and he composes for the group rather than the boy, so Laurent stays visible as the smallest and least-consulted body in the crowd. He is not the hero of his own house. He is the youngest person in a room where nobody is listening. The method comes out of Renoir: the deep-staged group in which family, guests and servants all speak at once, so a household is characterised by traffic rather than by dialogue scenes. Bazin's case for depth and duration was that a shot which refuses to force its meaning hands the ambiguity back to the viewer. Malle applies that to a comedy of manners instead of to neorealist poverty, and it works the same way.

Suzanne Baron's cutting agrees with the staging. She had learned on Tati's Mon Oncle how to hold a comic ensemble shot past the gag and release it on a stray gesture, and nearly every scene in Murmur ends on an afterthought. Nothing is stinger-cut. Episodes accumulate; acts never build. Deleuze calls this slackened connective tissue weak links, and what it buys is temps mort, dead time: stretches where nothing advances and the ordinary is simply held. In a thriller that is a fault. Here it is where the comedy lives, because family life is funny at the length family life actually takes.

Then the film moves to the spa and Ricardo Aronovich changes the light. The house was browns, ochres, dull gold. The spa is cool greens and whites, bright and enervated, a little too much light for people with nothing to do. Deleuze's term for a space that has stopped serving as the setting for an action is espace quelconque, the any-space-whatever: somewhere that no longer supports a sensory-motor response, so it gives off pure mood instead. A convalescent hotel is the perfect case. Time suspended, ordinary rules gone soft, nothing to do but look. It is also the shape Deleuze called the balade, the trip that transforms nothing: Laurent goes away, something enormous happens, and he comes back into the same family. What he mostly does there is watch. Benoît Ferreux plays him with an unshowy watchfulness that anchors the whole film, and that watching is the difference between a boy who acts on a situation and Deleuze's voyant, the seer, to whom things happen while he registers them.

The title tells you what this film thinks a person is. A heart murmur is an irregularity you carry permanently without being killed by it. It generates no plot. Scarlet fever puts Laurent in a body that produces no action, only duration: fever, then convalescence, then the slow business of being fifteen and physically unfinished. Deleuze's late cinema of the body is about precisely this, the body as the thing that carries time once the story has stopped carrying it. And the murmur functions as what he called a symbol, an object condensing the film's organising relation. Benign permanent irregularity. That is Malle's verdict on everything else in the picture.

Which is why the bedroom sequence is shot like a lunch. Aronovich lights it as unemphatically as any other room, Baron does not tighten, and there is no score at all, because Malle built the soundtrack entirely from records the characters own and play. Nothing offscreen is available to tell you how to feel. Given the material, another director had a form waiting: what Deleuze calls the impulse-image, the naturalist mode where a drive erupts beneath the social surface and drags everyone down an irreversible slope toward degradation. Malle declines the slope. Lea Massari plays Clara without a trace of predation or pathology — Italian in a French provincial house, married up and never quite naturalised, conducting her affair with a candour that scandalises her sons and amuses her, treating Laurent as her only ally. The woman who vanishes in L'Avventura is here embarrassingly, entirely present. And the last shot of the film is a family laughing.

That is the real transgression, and it is formal. Classical narrative is a machine for converting acts into consequences, and the Production Code was that machine written into law. By 1971 the Code had dissolved into ratings and French censorship had loosened after 1968, and Malle, already prosecuted to the American Supreme Court over Les Amants, understood what the loosening actually made available. Not more explicit content. A cut with no verdict attached. He took that from The 400 Blows, along with the method of directing an untrained adolescent to behave rather than perform, and swapped Truffaut's punitive ending for absolution. The other debts are equally specific. Vigo's Zéro de conduite gave him the school and scout-camp passages as loosely linked comic insurrections rather than plotted drama. Bresson, whose assistant he was on A Man Escaped, gave him a track made of diegetic noise with music admitted only as a found object; Murmur keeps that principle and throws away the ascetic framing. Elevator to the Gallows had let Miles Davis improvise commentary over projected rushes. This film finishes that argument by demoting the jazz to records a boy owns and puts on himself — the record player as the first instrument of adolescent privacy, a culture his parents cannot enter.

What it did to film was prove that dedramatisation could be warm. The postwar cinema Deleuze describes tends toward anomie: the seer sees too much, action fails, desolation follows. Malle kept the entire apparatus, the scatter, the slack links, the held time, the boy who watches, and got a comedy out of it. Three years in India shooting Phantom India had broken his working habits and sent him back to fiction wanting lived texture instead of engineering. He wrote this one alone, which he rarely did. It was nominated for an Oscar and it is still hard to place, and the difficulty is the achievement. Watch it again for the afterthoughts, the half-second Baron leaves after the joke and before the cut. That is where the film keeps its opinion. And the question it will not answer: if nothing here gets punished, what exactly has happened?