Louis Malle
Soffio Al Cuore

"Soffio al cuore" (Louis Malle, 1971)

Shades of an outdated auteur cinema that still manages to shock us.

Engaging feature film directed by the French filmmaker, writer, and producer Louis Malle, which closely follows, initially with a soft and silent step then with increasingly insistent closeness and identification, the discovery of physical love experienced by an almost 15-year-old adolescent in a prudish mid-'50s Dijon, and precisely for this reason, brazen and heedless.

A film filled with deep criticism of the French upper bourgeoisie (from which, moreover, Malle himself came): Catholic school, creeping pedophilia, and individual cultural growth. It takes on the characteristics that most profoundly mark the work of this great director who, at just 24 years old, stages two masterpieces of French cinematography: "Les Amantes" and "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud." A continuous blending of genres in which the documentary eye is constantly intertwined with his refined narrative taste.

Laurent reads Camus, Pierraine, and Histoire d'O, a racy and inappropriate book for an adolescent and for this reason hidden by his mother (Lea Massari), a carefree Italian evergreen, raised in Florence, called "the adventurer" by her husband's family, who cheats with the consent of her youngest son. Laurent constantly asks his mother if Monsieur Chevallier is his real father ("Why can't I love him.."). A continuous and engaging jazz background, garsoniere, and vacations at the Parisian thermal baths where the mother-son relationship will gain a new and deep "synchrony". Essential in giving us a taste of the nascent French generation of the '60s are Laurent's two older brothers, between visits to the brothel, falsifications of Carnet d'auteur, and impromptu dance parties in the living room at home. Among other performers, an excellent Ave Ninchi plays the role of the Italian nanny, with her French marked by continuous interjections. All of this is immersed in a whirlwind of engaging and captivating laughter that also characterizes the last sequence before the auditorium blackout.

Malle is like an explorer: he stages strong situations, sometimes even racy, presenting them with extreme kindness and grace, in order to shock the viewer or perhaps simply to craft a new and original way of making cinema.