Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  The notorious skinny-dipping scene, where Shepherd didn’t have to act her embarrassment . . . Bogdo had to shoot her on a closed set, cleverly editing in the rest of the naked cast. Its portrayal of rich kids with completely different moral standards to the poor felt like some kind of barbed dig at the hippy generation, of which the traditionalist Bogdo was proudly not a member.

  But – and unusually for a teen movie, and one with three such talented and appealing leads – the star of the film is one of the adults. Cloris Leachman’s Ruth Popper is one of the screen’s greatest studies of repressed rage. Every smile, grimace and thousand-yard glare speaks of another disappointment, or indignity, or the sheer visceral agony of being starved of sex and intimacy in a life where nothing else good is possible. Her face is often a mask of frozen terror, yet she’s somehow even more beautiful and sexy than Shepherd, and her fury at the film’s end feels like a feminist call-to-arms (‘I haven’t done anything wrong! Why can’t I quit apologising?’) even though preaching is studiously avoided. The Last Picture Show was only Leachman’s tenth role in 24 years, and her Oscar is one of the few that went to the best rather than the most politically expedient choice.

  In 1990 Bogdanovich directed a sequel to his greatest film. It was called Texasville and brought together the original cast. Its plot insists that everyone stays where they are, and makes Bridges and Shepherd a proper, adult couple. I’ll never watch it, ’cos, in my far superior version, Duane dies in Korea, Sonny and Ruth run away together and become beatniks in the Lower East Side, and Jacy marries a Bush and becomes the first female President. Everywhere she goes, you hear the wind whistling, even on a still day. And everything seems to be in black and white.

  LE SOUFFLE AU COEUR (MURMUR OF THE HEART)

  1971

  Starring: Benoît Ferreux, Lea Massari, Daniel Gélin, Marc Winocourt, Fabien Ferraux, Michel Lonsdale

  Dir.: Louis Malle

  Plot: The only angst-free teen movie ever made. Oh . . . and the hero fucks his mother.

  Key line: ‘I don’t want you to be unhappy, or ashamed, or sorry. We’ll remember it as a very beautiful and solemn moment that will never happen again.’

  If you haven’t seen Louis Malle’s celebrated but controversial coming-of-age classic . . . beware. It’s a minefield and a mindfuck. No, there are no scenes of rape back-dropped by old musical numbers. No sleazy subterranean peril. No violence, borstals, pregnancies, mad scientists or therapy cops. No nihilistic kids living in the streets, spreading deadly diseases or screaming into the void about the everlasting angst caused by terrible parents or a society that doesn’t care. No drugs, unless you count booze and cigars. Not even a wobbly alien or a bloody corpse in sight. That’s why this is so unsettling. There is virtually no teen angst whatsoever, despite the fact that its teen male hero is, technically speaking, sexually abused by his parent. Le Souffle Au Coeur is a happy film about incest and paedophilia. Who else but the French?

  Set in 1954 Dijon against a backdrop of the French war against Indo-China – which would soon become the American war against Vietnam – Le Souffle Au Coeur tells the semi-autobiographical tale of 14-year-old Laurent Chevalier (Benoît Ferreux) and his wealthy upper middle-class family. Laurent and his two brothers are right scallywags, nicking jazz records by their beloved Charlie Parker, pinching cash from mom’s purse, collecting in the streets for charity and keeping the proceeds to spend on adult proclivities, like the booze and cigars. Dad is a remote rich guy, but Italian Mom Clara (Massari) is a whole different kettle of dangerous fish. Young, beautiful, spoiled, immature and entirely unwilling to discipline her boys, she is a flirtatious sister rather than an authority figure.

  Laurent’s main preoccupation is losing his virginity. An attempt to do so with a hooker in a brothel is foiled by his annoying older brothers. But the unlikely solution to his problem is found when he is diagnosed with a heart murmur after a dose of scarlet fever, and Clara takes him to a spa to recuperate. He goes there a boy and comes back a man . . . or something like that.

  Critics are fond of pointing out that prurient types in 1971 paid all the attention to the incest scene, and that Le Souffle Au Coeur is about far more than an illicit sexual act. Nevertheless, when you sit down to write a script based upon your own teenage years and then include a scene where ‘you’ shag your mother, I think you are, at the very least, consciously aware that the shock of incest is going to overwhelm all your subtle mise en scènes and deftly written subtexts. The guy knew that the press would howl, and that the scandal would put bums on seats. And it did. Le Souffle Au Coeur, unlike most of Malle’s films, was a global success that grossed millions of francs.

  The special feature on the current UK DVD features an interview with Malle’s brother and collaborator Vincent. He reveals that this most mellow and lyrical of the French new wave’s directors (Louis Malle died in 1995) really did have a heart murmur in his teens and that their mother did take him to a spa to recuperate. He then assures us, with a dismissive laugh, that they didn’t share a bed. Without wishing to speak ill of the dead or the Malle family . . . if you had done your mother, would you tell your brother about it? The same goes double if you’re the mother, right?

  But anyway, I’m getting prurient, so I’ll cease and desist. If you really are going to decide to put a teen-mother incest plot point in your movie about a happy childhood, the most crucial and sensitive problem becomes: how do you shoot a positive scene about paedophilia in such a way that you don’t get lynched, or, at the very least, banned from making movies ever again?

  One key element is the casting of a non-actor in the lead role. Benoît Ferreux went on to have an acting career, most bizarrely in legendary football/prisoner of war curio Escape To Victory alongside Sylvester Stallone, Bobby Moore, Michael Caine and Pelé. But, until he was cast in Le Souffle Au Coeur at age 14, Ferreux had never acted, and he brings the same level of anti-acting naturalism to Laurent as was pulled off by the cast of Larry Clark’s Kids (see here) in the mid ’90s. The lesson from those two movies seems to be, if you are going to depict children in taboo sexual acts, don’t employ actors. As soon as proper actor types start emoting theatrically, the viewer will feel exploited. Keep a straight face and maybe we’ll see the scene in context.

  The rest is all down to undercutting the potential perviness with elegant virtuosity.

  Laurent and Clara have returned to their chintzy room at the spa after a drunken Bastille Day party packed full of soldiers on leave and suffused with class conflict. Clara collapses on the bed, complaining of exhaustion. Laurent offers to undress her, and she lets him. I should point out that the pair have spent the entire film being far more touchy-feely with each other than we would expect 14-year-old boys to be with their mothers. But then, most mothers don’t look like Lea Massari.

  Clara turns on to her side as if falling asleep. Laurent removes her dress and her bra, without being able to see her breasts. He pauses. He then bends on to the bed, says goodnight, and nuzzles her neck just a little too affectionately. She turns on to her back and holds him to her. He continues to nuzzle. Massari quickly and cleverly purveys a brief moment of benevolent panic, forcing his head down so she’s not looking at him. We can’t see Laurent’s face, but he is squirming. She kisses the top of his head a couple of times. And then, very suddenly, as if she’s lost all resistance, she begins to kiss his head harder and faster, and . . .

  That’s it. A jump-cut to a naked Laurent, lying on his side in bed. Clara, in a white dressing-gown, is also on the bed, watching him as he apparently sleeps. She begins to say the key lines above, and Laurent is not asleep and turns to look at her. He grabs her and hugs her. She swears him to secrecy, like any other paedophile, one supposes, and he agrees. Scene over.

  The whole scene last less than four minutes and is a lesson in economy, suggestion and . . . and here’s the scary bit – eroticism. Nope, never wanted to shag my mum. Yep, do think both incest and adults having sex with 14-year-olds is disgu
sting. But, yep . . . the incest scene is Le Souffle Au Coeur is sexy. Louis Malle was one evil son of a bitch.

  We can’t know for sure that Laurent is not traumatised by the experience. But the way Charlie Parker is tootling away on the soundtrack while he sneaks out in his jazzy tweed blazer and powder-blue shirt in order to go to the room of a girl at the Bastille Day party and try to get laid again suggests, very strongly, that this is not an event that he is seeing as abuse. He even pulls it off with Girl 2. The implication is that he is now man enough to get what he wants and know what to do with it. The film ends with the entire family in uproarious laughter, utterly bonded and full of joy, amused at the slapstick comedy that is sex.

  Oops . . . I’ve committed the crime, ain’t I? I’ve made a masterpiece all about the controversial bit, as if that’s all Malle’s film is. You need to know how well this matches up to other teen dramas about having your cherry popped like Where The Boys Are (see here) and Little Darlings (see here). Well, rest assured: Le Souffle Au Coeur is not some dull art film spiced up by a tacked-on dirty bit. It is a gorgeous, funny, spiky snapshot of what it was like to grow up rich and bourgie bourgie in a France that was still fighting imperial wars, and was all set to bequeath its Asian mistake to America, and then stand back and pretend it was nothing to do with them. Even though it is shot in colour and doesn’t feature Jean-Paul Belmondo behaving like a ’50s gangster or an accusatory ending on a beach, it is drenched in the French new wave’s unique ability to merge drama and documentary while remaining pure cinema. It is light, gay, satirical, sensual, has an instantly evocative jazz soundtrack provided by the likes of Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Sidney Bechet and is entirely lovely to look at.

  It would have been a very, very good movie without the incest scene. But it wouldn’t have stood out from any other affectionate childhood memoir. Instead, Le Souffle Au Coeur resonates, and leaves you with the discombobulating feeling that you’ve just witnessed a film that argues, with a mixture of aesthetic rigour and flowery flippancy, that if we could all just lose our virginity to our parents, our sexual rites-of-passage would be so much better. So despite – actually, strike that – because of the classy music and sets, the skilled composition and the integrity of the naturalist performances, Le Souffle Au Coeur easily beats the likes of Kids, Martin, A Clockwork Orange and Harold And Maude to the dubious honour of being the most twisted teen movie of all time. Who else but the French?

  HAROLD AND MAUDE

  1972

  Starring: Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon, Vivian Pickles

  Dir.: Hal Ashby

  Plot: Boy-meets-granny, boy-loses-granny.

  Key line: ‘It’s a very common neurosis, particularly in this society, whereby the male child subconsciously wishes to sleep with his mother. Of course, what puzzles me, Harold, is that you want to sleep with your grandmother.’

  Hal Ashby was a world-class editor turned director who made a string of key New Hollywood movies in the 1970s. Despite being nearly 40 by the time hippy culture hit the mainstream, Ashby was the real thing, a bearded long-hair left-winger who loved The Rolling Stones and raged against the Vietnam War. He also, like so many of his generation, got heavily into drugs in the ’70s while his personal, idiosyncratic movies fell deeply and quickly out of favour in the post-Lucas/Spielberg ’80s. He died, in 1988, aged 59, of liver and colon cancer, an almost-forgotten film-maker despite having directed huge commercial and critical hits The Last Detail, Shampoo, Coming Home and Being There. In Peter Biskind’s definitive study of the movie brat era, Easy Riders And Raging Bulls, the author ends his story with Ashby’s painful death, seeing it as the final nail in the coffin of counter-culture idealism in American film.

  In hindsight, the trouble with Hal Ashby started right here. What kind of holy fool decides that his second film should be the story of a love affair between two people with a 60-year age gap, written by a pool cleaner as a college assignment? And then reels in shock and horror when the tale is greeted with exactly the same repulsed hostility by critics as its characters are greeted within the film? Harold And Maude cost $1.2 million dollars to make and was thrown off cinema screens within one week. It has become a much-loved cult film, which didn’t do Ashby much good in his lifetime of battling film studios to keep control of his gently transgressive visions.

  Harold Chasen (Bud Cort) is a gangling and translucently pale 19-year-old with the face of a baby and the voice and demeanour of a dour middle-aged man. He always sports formal wear and has a pudding-bowl haircut. His favourite hobby is faking his own grisly death. His mother’s favourite hobby is playing the ignore-him-and-he’ll-get-over-it game. This is fair enough, except someone young who is screaming for attention usually needs it in some way, even if it is tiresome. So Harold is going slowly more and more insane.

  They are very rich and live in a grand but gloomy mansion that looks like a haunted house. He never has any company of his own age, but his mother (Vivian Pickles) and posh friends talk about him as if he’s not really there. Despite his painful weirdness, Mater simply dismisses any problems he might have by saying things like, ‘Please try and be more vivacious, Dear’, while regaling her dinner guests with elegant but dull stories of foreign travel.

  Nevertheless, Mother does suggest cures for her son’s chronic morbidity, all of which are greeted with a stare of memorably wide-eyed terror. He goes to therapy. He is ordered to get married through a dating agency (‘They screen out the fat and the ugly’). She sends him to a psycho military uncle with a missing arm, played by Charles Tyner, a character actor who actually looks like the accidental offspring of a man and a hawk, who attempts to force Harold into the army. This last element was almost obligatory in all American films made by newish directors from around 1968 until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. In that sense, Ashby wasn’t the most original of movie brat storytellers. The Uncle Victor scenes are straight out of Dr Strangelove and M*A*S*H, while the hippy singer-songwriter soundtrack and swimming pool scenes are borrowed from The Graduate. What made Ashby different from his peers is the gentle, rambling and droll manner with which he paced his counter-cultural satires, eschewing anger or hysteria for a resigned amusement at the stupidity of the human race in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut or John Kennedy O’Toole’s peerless A Confederacy Of Dunces. He’s a master of creating unlikely comedy simply from shots where human beings look unavoidably small and distant; a large object will dominate the frame, dwarfing the characters and their shallow obsessions and values. One especially choice scene involves Harold’s mother swimming past his apparently lifeless corpse floating face down, and the offhand way she shoots a distracted glance, rolls her eyes, and gets on with perfecting her breast-stroke.

  Ashby’s understated surrealism manipulates us into empathising with Harold, even though he’s a scary little creep. There’s something of the Malcolm McDowell (see If . . ., p. 97 and A Clockwork Orange, here) about Cort’s alien intensity and mad eyes, and, if the story had taken another turn, you can imagine him as a baby-faced killer, like George A. Romero’s Martin (see here). As it is, when faced with these blind, pretentious adults and the ludicrous world they’ve created, Harold’s chronic death wish seems the only rational response.

  While indulging his other favourite hobby – he buys a hearse and gatecrashes funerals – Harold meets Maude aka Dame Marjorie Chardin (Ruth Gordon), an eccentric octogenarian whose energy and fuck-you attitude displays all the lust for life that Harold entirely lacks. She attracts his attention by hissing ‘Pssst!’, flirting inappropriately and offering him liquorice . . . a black sweet, naturally . . . before stealing a priest’s car. She lives in a trailer full of stolen junk and her own left-field art installations, including a sort of giant wooden vagina. The two fall in love and head towards an ending that, for obvious reasons, can neither be happy nor ever after.

  Ruth Gordon won a Golden Globe nomination for her role here – as did Cort – and should have received far more for one of cinema’s most memorable performan
ces. Thin and birdlike, she’s the nightmare embarrassing old broad as bringer of life-affirming chaos; a crazy old bat just as likely to show you her knickers as offer you a cup of oat straw tea. Gordon doesn’t so much act in the film as gleefully attack it. Her looks are irrelevant; a sexual energy courses from her regardless of – and entirely separate from – her physicality. Maude is designed to personify positivity born out of struggle and this is exactly what Gordon does, crackling with a rude idealism that makes transgression not just funny, but necessary, and managing to carry off some fairly cringe-inducing hippy-dippy dialogue. She tells Harold (and us) that she is going to die very soon within seconds of her first appearance onscreen, and helpfully explains her role in the film: ‘I’m merely acting as a gentle reminder: here today, gone tomorrow. So don’t get attached to things.’