Le Souffle Au Coeur

Louis Malle movie, 1971
Malle's style, in all honesty, can be summed up pretty quickly. Longish shots much of the time, here a quite freely moving camera, sometimes already moving in the plot. A very clean mis-en-scene, with high key lighting, a variety of colours, and everything looking rather expensive and new. A lot of depth, certainly wide-angle lens (no one too near the camera), further convey a kind of smoothness. This is highly elegant filmmaking.
This is a film that is difficult to know quite what to make of. It screams out that it is 'fun', 'jazzy', and comes on at times like a '400 coups' remake, except with none of the spirit, the sadness, in a way, of that film. This is certainly pleasurable to watch, and this film is in some ways honest; about sex, about growing up. It is, in its narrative construction, precisely what it says it is; joie de vivre (in its strict bourgois setting, but anyway), fun japes, well paced, with an insouiance that I would not feel guilty in liking.
The really negative aspects here is the unthinking nature, in the joy taken in something that is a lot of the time pretty vile, rich kids sexually humiliating each other, messing around with too much money. This is pure pleaure cinema, but because of this it isn't perfectly pleasurable. One wouldn't like to take away from the fact though that it has smart set-ups, each scene is a little piece of fun, and a tone that is repeated, in its freedom, before and after in variuos coming of age tales.
All these essential moral condemnations, though, are brought up slightly short by the key scene at the end. This scene does what it has to do; it shows the central perversion at the heart of the piece. Does this make everything O.K., does it forgive it, as satire?
Yes and no. Yes, in that credit for the bravery. No, in that if you have been wallowing, you can't just undo it all bu saying 'its satire' (and even the final scene seems to be taken rather in the stride).
This, as I may have given the misleading impression, is more than something to straightforwardly bash. It is sweet, charming, looks beautiful in a clean way, is great fun. It may even be forgiven for all this at the end. But, in my mind, it probably comes down on the side of not so. Though any defineteness is difficult.