Incest is the issue in Louis Malle's new comedy, even though the film manages to reach an ending that has all the simple-minded cheeriness of an updated Gallic episode of Leave it to Beaver. Witness: 15-year-old Laurent Chevalier, shoes in hand, tiptoes into his room after spending the night with a new girl-friend. He freezes when he spots, waiting for him in the room, his two older brothers and his father--whose threatening look demands an explanation for his son's absence. While Laurent is still standing in awkward silence, his mother enters, sizes up the situation with a glance, and begins to look upset over the impending battle. But the brothers can't keep from chuckling at Laurent's embarrassment, Mom smiles, and finally Dad's anger melts as they all join in laughing together....FIN.

Why is laughter so easy in such a difficult situation? It isn't that The Murmur of the Heart is the kind of comedy that permits easy nonsequiturs, and it isn't that the advent of Laurent's girl-friend is preferable for everyone concerned to Laurent's incestuous leanings toward his mother. That laughter is by no means inevitable within the context of the film, but Malle's real point is the film's peculiar anti-Romantic heresy. Subtly suggesting the possibility of all kinds of psychological traps for its intelligent and very sensitive adolescent hero (including homosexuality, transvestism, a penchant for cruelty, and of course a permanent sexual attachment to his mother), Malle's film seems to be flatly countering the romantic tradition of the sensitive youth destroyed by society. Murmur turns out to be a comedy because Laurent emerges relatively unscathed.

For two reasons the tricky subject matter of the film never becomes too-hot-to-handle comically. In the first place, Laurent's mother is utterly unable to assume a mother's role: she is beautiful, young, and childlike, a capricious Italian woman who married at 16 and who has never quite learnt the ways of the French. The comfortable amorality of upper-middle-class Dijon in 1954 also serves to lighten the mood of the film. The Chevalier home is a place of hard-working servants, white tablecloths, and wine-filled crystal; original paintings are on the walls, the Tour de France on the radio, and Maurice Chevalier on T.V. Laurent's older brothers amuse themselves through slapstick fights with the servants, light banter with their father over the Indochina War, and posing adolescent playboys.

In the midst of it all, Laurent's precocity impresses almost everyone: he writes fine essays on Camus and on suicide for his teacher at school, wins his mother's heart with his advanced sensitivity, and delights his brothers by adeptly following in their not-quite-rakish footsteps. He only manages to annoy his conservative father because of his lack of table-manners.

Everything in Laurent's life seems happily unimportant until he begins to make discoveries that we take quite seriously: his priest-teacher, while lecturing him on masturbation, puts his hands around Laurent's thigh; Laurent jealously discovers that his mother has a lover, and then discovers that his doctor-father doesn't seem to care. ("You have to be a saint in this profession," says the gynecologist, but we suspect he's not about to be canonized.) And when, after being hauled off to a roadhouse-brothel by his brothers, Laurent has a small measure of success with a prostitute, his drunken brothers spoil it all by bursting into the room to drag him from bed at a thoroughly inopportune moment.

Taking these discoveries seriously, we expect to see their complex effects on the boy, and indeed there is at least one: he develops a heart-murmur while away from his mother at scout camp. The sudden illness separates him from an ardently admiring young friend and sends him home to be nursed by Mama. The doctor's prescription, conveniently enough, is a rest-cure at Bourbon Les Bains, a typically French resort for the well-to-do where the guests nurse their hypochondria with daily doses of mineral water and gossip. At the baths, Mother's attempts at strict motherliness break down under close quarters, and Laurent asserts his maturity by taking on the role of her public escort. His pride is deflated when she leaves him for a two-day stay with her old lover, and Laurent retaliates by dressing up in her clothes and mimicking her conversations with the man. His confidence bounces back only when she returns in tears and he can, as her confidant, comfort her by saying. "Don't cry--you'll find someone who loves you as you are."

That's exactly what happens. After a drunken Bastille Day Party, the long-prepared for event finally takes place. Laurent's mother-turned-lover helps him to get over his sudden shame with very genuine tenderness. "We'll remember it as a rare moment that will never happen again...I'll remember it without remorse."

At this point in the film, a middle-aged man across the aisle leaned in my direction and whispered authoritatively, "Excellent, excellent." He was pleased with Malle's treatment of incest, and with good reason. Murmur plays a traditionally tragic theme in a nostalgically comic key, and proves it can be done with perfect taste, intelligence, and close attention to fleeting emotion. If our notions of the destructive effects of the inevitable disillusionment and sexual confusion of adolescence are too much influenced by the Joyces, Lawrences, and Hesses of this world, then Malle gently insists that it doesn't have to be that way.

But writer-director Malle calls his shots a little unfairly at times. His script is contrived to labor an occasional unfunnny joke and, though Benoit Fereux's acting is mostly convincing, the role he has to fill is just a little bit larger than life.

But the real problem lies in the mix of styles Malle has tried to meld into a single film. Lurking beneath the charm of this comedy is a very definite potential for evil that creates tension without every surfacing. We like the Chevaliers because they're so resilient that they never really hurt each other; but given the chance (in another film, say) it wouldn't take much twisting to make some of them very cruel.

Without the enticing presence of Malle's understated heresy, Murmur could easily be relegated to the ranks of the pleasant comedies the French have such a reputation for. As it is, (let's be frank) Malle succeeds better with his Gallic charm (Excellent!) than with his tour-deadolescent-psychology. These strange bedfellows make an engaging couple only as far as they can be reconciled into a single film.