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Oedipus Rex by way of Jean Vigo, a characteristically prankish Louis Malle formulation. Dijon in the Fifties is a carefree realm for the fox-faced teenager (Benoît Ferreux), the runt of the bourgeois family litter who collects donations for the wounded in Indochina while filching Charlie Parker records at the store. Jazz and Camus are passions, older brothers are nuisances, girls are preoccupations. "No wicked thoughts?" "Sometimes." Mom (Lea Massari) is an Italian sensualist married to a staid gynecologist (Daniel Gélin), more playmate than authority figure. The protagonist has no truck with sacrilege, he notes that it would require actual belief, the priest at school (Michael Lonsdale) concludes confession by rubbing the lad's thighs. Left to themselves, the boys throw gobs of spinach across the dinner table, raid the liquor cabinet for a house party, and drive to the jaunty bordello for the youngest's première fois. Facing adult surprise that he's read Story of O, he just shrugs: "There's no childhood anymore." Malle's view of pampered adolescence as a state of sustained effervescence, all pop appetite and inquisitive impudence. The title is the doctor's diagnosis after a bit of scarlet fever at scout camp, a sojourn at the deluxe spa with Mom is in order. The vivacious lady observes "different ways of loving," she's later peeped on while in a Degas bathtub. (The brat reveals something of a chic Norman Bates streak, laying out maternal lingerie on a bedspread in a sort of incantation of erotic cupidity, cf. Skolimowski's Deep End.) The upshot is a tipsy Jocasta on Bastille Day, "notre secret" is cherished along the lines of Minnelli's Tea and Sympathy. "Remember it as a very beautiful and solemn moment that will never happen again." The laughing coda gives way to Bertolucci's operatic therapy session (Luna). With Ave Ninchi, Fabien Ferreux, Marc Winocourt, Micheline Bona, Henri Poirier, Gila von Weitershausen, and Jacques Sereys.
--- Fernando F. Croce |