Louis Malle    The French Director Diagnoses His 'Murmur of the Heart' By PAUL CHUTKOW In the spring of 1970, using the threads of his own adolescence as guide wires, the French film director Louis Malle inched out onto a dangerous cinematic tightrope. He decided to make a highly personal film about a sensitive young boy coming of age, and he decided to make it not using trained child actors but with fresh faces and raw talent he himself would form. By temperament, Mr. Malle is a cerebral, methodical film maker who works like a surgeon, probing individual psyches and the collective French body for wounds and fractures, even if occasionally he disturbs a deeply buried nerve. What made this film project especially daring was that the psyche he was probing was his own, and the nerve he found himself touching, ever so gently, was incest. "What happened was a real surprise," Mr. Malle now recalls. "I had been thinking of doing a film about my adolescence. I sat down to write a script and I came up, in a little more than a week, with an almost finished product. It was like automatic writing. I was sort of carried away. I certainly did not set out to do a film about incest. But I began exploring a very intense relationship between a mother and her son, and I ended up pushing it all the way. Maybe that was my way of dealing with the Oedipus complex, making it a fantasy in a screenplay, but I don't know." Whatever his initial impulse, Mr. Malle successfully turned this risky, multifaceted gamble into a poignant, provocative film called "Murmur of the Heart." The film was a critical success in Paris, but because it did raise the taboo issue of incest, "Murmur of the Heart" provoked a storm of controversy in the more traditional quarters of France. For a time in the 1970's it was banned from French television, even though its climactic scene between mother and son is handled with tenderness, taste and nothing at all explicit. Today, in both France and America, the film is considered a classic, but because it had received only limited exposure in the United States, Mr. Malle and the distribution company Orion Classics felt that "Murmur of the Heart" merited re-release. Now, with a brand new print, it has just opened in New York and will open later all across the country. "I saw the film again last year," Mr. Malle said in a long interview about the film and about how he works with children. "I was surprised at how direct it was, how funny it was. It is what I call partly invented autobiography. Like the character of Laurent in the film, I had a heart murmur, I went to a spa for treatment, and I had two older brothers who took care of my education, from jazz to sex. But I made up the character of the Italian mother, this warmhearted rebel who just can't adjust to French bourgeois ways. My own mother was nothing like her." The way Mr. Malle himself sees it now, "Murmur of the Heart" stands out in his 30-year career as a breakthrough film, both in the way he came to direct its child stars and in the way he was able to translate his personal experience into screen drama. Just two years later, he discovered Pascal Blaise, a 17-year-old French farmboy who had never before seen a film, and he turned him into the stunning antihero of "Lacombe, Lucien," about a troubled, violent youth who becomes a Nazi collaborator in occupied France. In 1978, seven years after "Murmur," Mr. Malle directed "Pretty Baby," starring a pre-pubescent Brooke Shields as a prostitute in New Orleans. And last year, in a film that was nominated for an Oscar and zstablished him as the pre-eminent director in France, Mr. Malle again used untrained children to turn an incident from his own wartime childhood into the highly praised "Au Revoir Les Enfants." At age 56, with his square tortoise-shell glasses and his calm, delicate hands, Mr. Malle today even looks like the master surgeon his film methodology suggests. His offices in the old Les Halles district of Paris are tidy and functional, and so is the big wooden desk where he does much of his work. On this quiet Saturday morning in March, his wife Candice Bergen was back in Los Angeles, working on her hit television show, and his three children were scattered on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Sitting at his desk in a comfortable plaid shirt, puffing contentedly on a pipe, every once in a while brushing back one of the errant curls flying wild about his ears, Mr. Malle looked like just the kind of cool, reassuring orthopedist you would hope to find if your child broke a leg during a family skiiing vacation in France. "In working with children in films, choosing just the right ones is the big thing, and it's terrifying," said Mr. Malle. "It's a decision with no return. If you make the wrong decision, you're in big trouble." For "Murmur of the Heart," to find just the right kids to play Laurent-Louis and his two older brothers, Mr. Malle and his staff put ads in newspaper and magazines across France. The number of responses was staggering, and by process of elimination, the staff weeded through 500 applications. Mr. Malle himself combed through 100 lively prospects. Scores of kids came in for personal interviews and improvised video tests. But for Mr. Malle no lights blinked on, until a pair of brothers named Benoit and Laurent Ferreux came in. "They were interested in being extras," Mr. Malle recalled. "I found them very interesting, and we organized a little screen test. Neither one had ever been in a film before. Benoit was very intriguing. He had that physical clumsiness of somebody just growing up. It was marvelous. He was funny and very bright and just at that moment in life where you have to start coming to terms with your own sexuality." But Mr. Malle had a problem. Benoit, at the age of 15, was very reluctant to take on the role of Laurent. It was one thing to be an extra in a film by the esteemed Louis Malle; it was quite another to be thrust into a starring role without experience, especially in a film drawn from the director's own childhood and a film that dealt with incest, no matter how gracefully. "In the beginning I was a little scared," Benoit now recalls, 18 years later. "I had read the scenario, which was clearly daring for the period, with its final scene of incest. But the story was full of love, and there was no hint of vulgarity. Still, the whole idea seemed so enormous, so beyond me." As a result, Benoit gave his director an agonizing wait. "I can still remember his mother telling me, 'He doesn't want to do it. He's scared,' " Mr. Malle said. "I only learned later he felt uncomfortable because he had a very intense relationship with his mother." After much convincing, Benoit finally agreed to play Laurent, and his own older brother Fabien was chosen to play the role of one of his older brothers, a support that immediately helped comfort Benoit. To bracket and support the boys, Mr. Malle turned to two accomplished European actors, France's Daniel Gelin as the father, an impatient, short-tempered gynecologist with no time or sympathy for little Laurent, and to Italy's Lea Massari, to play the warmhearted, unconventional mother who just can't stop herself from showering maternal love on her precious Laurent. With his cast in place, Mr. Malle next went about the difficult task of creating the proper on-set chemistry, the kind of warm, supportive atmosphere that would help the boys develop the confidence they needed to properly take on their demanding roles. Part of his method was to break down any distance between himself and the boys, then between them and the battery of adult actors and technicians. Mr. Malle: "I gave a pep talk to the crew. 'The kids are on the screen, not us. We have to do everything possible to make their lives easier, to make them feel comfortable.' As a director you have to be especially careful. I'm very much against bossing children. Instead of telling them what to do, you have to listen to them. A lot. And you have to trust them, so that they develop the confidence to take over their characters." Benoit responded right away. "Louis was like our big brother," he says. "He always sought to guide me, as opposed to direct me. In no way was he ever tyrannical. But he was always present, right there behind the camera. When I needed help, he always knew exactly how to guide me, with simple things, by taking me aside, by talking to me." Two scenes were critical. The first was Laurent's first real sexual encounter, in a brothel where he was taken by his two older brothers. Again, it is a very tender and tasteful scene, with young Laurent losing his innocence in the arms of a very understanding and supportive young woman - until the two brothers, dead drunk, barge in to ruin this most intimate and memorable moment in a young man's life. "My two brothers did precisely that to me," Mr. Malle laughs now, but the laugh catches in his throat. "I should have been traumatized for the rest of my life. But I wasn't. I must have been very strong." The second critical scene, thus foreshadowed, was what Mr. Malle calls the "accident" of incest. It comes after Laurent's mother has had far too much to drink at a raucous Bastille Day party in the spa town where Laurent has been sent to treat his heart murmur. Dizzy, Lea Massari flops down on the bed and kicks off her shoes, and an insistent little Laurent offers to help her get out of her clothes. "I discussed the scene at great length with Benoit," Mr. Malle said. "I was very concerned that he not be uncomfortable. If a child is uncomfortable with a scene or a line of dialogue, you'd better adjust. They have no training to fall back on, so you'd better change the line. You can never ask children to trick or fake, because you see it immediately." In France, a director can seek a Government subsidy for a proposed film by applying for a financial advance against future box-office sales. Mr. Malle did just that by presenting his scenario, and he received initial approval, only to be ultimately rejected at a higher level because of this very incest scene. The decision amounted to recensorship by a now defunct state-appointed film board. "They told me, 'Shoot the film if you want to, but we'll probably ban it.' Well, that really helped me raise private money," Mr. Malle said. "And when they actually saw the film, there was nothing the censors could say. The proposition of incest was shocking, but not what you saw on the screen. Nothing was tasteless, shocking or graphic." To make the point even clearer, the mother played so compassionately by Lea Massari aftewards tries to banish any guilt from Laurent's troubled brow. "I don't want you to be unhappy," she says, "nor that you feel shame or regret at what happened. If you want, we'll just remember this as a unique moment, very beautiful, very important, and never to be repeated." To make the point that little Laurent comes away both healthy and unscarred, Mr. Malle has him get up from his mother's bed and go knock on the door of a young girl his own age who had already let him know she had already started working her way through the very same difficult passage. In the morning, they wake up together, happily entwined. When Louis Malle, the master French surgeon says, "It's nothing; take two aspirins and go to bed," he means it. "That's the way I meant the ending to be understood," he said. "That Laurent's perfectly fine. He's healthy," Mr. Malle said. "I wanted to de-dramatize incest, or at least this form of it. The ugliness of incest in most situations, in the father-daughter situation, is usually a rape, and it's violent, traumatic and destructive. But from the very beginning I was not dealing with that. I was dealing with excessive love, what I can only describe as a love affair between mother and son." In France, plenty of psychiatrists and film critics did not see it quite that way. Even in the seemingly liberated Paris of 1971, many of them screamed scandal and demanded the film be banned. In some of the angriest French press reactions to the film, such as in the conservative Le Figaro, critics worried aloud that young Benoit Ferreux the actor might wind up permanently scarred by the film. Others, like the more liberal Le Monde, noted with irony that little Laurent at 15 was safe; entry was not permitted to any movie-goer under 18. Mr. Ferreux is now 33, a father of two, a film maker in his own right; and in a telephone interview he assured "Murmur" viewers past, present and future that he has suffered no lasting after-effects. "For years afterward, I heard 'How's your mother?' But there was nothing traumatizing about it," Mr. Ferreux said. "I'm much bigger now, and whenever I see the film I only think, 'Boy, was I a shrimp!' " Copyright The New York Times Company