incest in film has always weirded me out, even when the filmmaker is clearly not endorsing it. Louis Malle is clearly endorsing it. or at least indulging it, savoring it, presenting it as something closer to fantasy than transgression. That should have repelled me. It didn't. and I find that genuinely interesting.
the reason it didn't is the first half of the film, which builds such a warm and sympathetic portrait of this bourgeois family, the two older brothers, the dynamic between them, this teenager navigating all of it that by the time Malle gets to where he is obviously going, you are already so fond of these people that you just kind of go with it. you have been disarmed. the film earns a strange kind of permission through sheer charm and you don't fully realize it has happened until it already has.
I don't entirely know what to make of that as a filmmaking achievement. It is either very sophisticated or slightly insidious or both. but I cannot deny that it worked on me, and that the incest, rather than souring the experience, somehow elevated it into something more singular and strange and memorable. a film that should not work as well as it does.
incest in film has always weirded me out, even when the filmmaker is clearly not endorsing it. Louis Malle is clearly endorsing it. or at least indulging it, savoring it, presenting it as something closer to fantasy than transgression. That should have repelled me. It didn't. and I find that genuinely interesting.
the reason it didn't is the first half of the film, which builds such a warm and sympathetic portrait of this bourgeois family, the two older brothers, the dynamic between them, this teenager navigating all of it that by the time Malle gets to where he is obviously going, you are already so fond of these people that you just kind of go with it. you have been disarmed. the film earns a strange kind of permission through sheer charm and you don't fully realize it has happened until it already has.
I don't entirely know what to make of that as a filmmaking achievement. It is either very sophisticated or slightly insidious or both. but I cannot deny that it worked on me, and that the incest, rather than souring the experience, somehow elevated it into something more singular and strange and memorable. a film that should not work as well as it does.
