Louis Malle’s critically acclaimed Murmur of the Heart gracefully combines elements of comedy, drama, and autobiography in a candid portrait of a precocious adolescent boy’s sexual maturation. Both shocking and deeply poignant, this is one of the finest coming-of-age films ever made.

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This is a jolly coming-of-age story about a 15-year-old boy named Laurent Chevalier who is growing up in bourgeois surroundings in Dijon, France. This is France in the mid-1950s rather than America in the 1990s. Thus, Laurent is unharmed by events which would irreparably shatter the self-esteem of a modern American adolescent: he gets drunk, he smokes, he has sex (including incestuous sex), he is smothered by his mother, he is ignored by his father, a priest makes a pass at him, he gets rheumatoid fever, etc. There's enough scandalous behavior in this film to make 100 made-for-TV movies, and yet this is a very happy and oddly innocent tale.

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A delicately observed study of Laurent (Ferreux), a teenage boy anxious to lose his virginity but somewhat stifiled by life in a middle-class family where there's little chance of enjoying his latest Charlie Parker disc, let alone getting laid. But when scarlet fever exacerbates a mild heart condition, he is sent to a sanatorium accompanied by his mother (Massari) - on the rebound from an affair. The point of the movie is not the much discussed singular and single, sensitively handled liaison between the 14-year-old and his mother but the observation of life c. 1954 and the portrait of the boy, played with great charm by Ferreux.

 Excerpt from Channel 4 located HERE

An overview of the package and supplements disc are briefly examined HERE