"Murmur Of The Heart" (1971)

What ever happened to Anna after she disappeared in "L'Avventura"? We discover (or so Louis Malle informs us) that she moved to France and married a prosperous gynecologist, Dr. Chevalier, a pedantic but generous man who looks like Garibaldi when he sports a beard. She adopts the name Clara. She has children with him, three boys, and for some time lives contented to have so many men in the house. Eventually she, like Madame Bovary, takes up a lover since by nature she cannot endure provincialism. She is to her core a redblooded gypsy woman. & her youngest boy, Laurent, utterly adores her.

Laurent lives happily tyrannized by two older brothers whose apparent mission in life is to subvert every convention that surrounds their daily life and tease their baby brother with as much sarcasm as humanly possible. He inherits from them the standards in a 16 year old boy's life: Charlie Parker, literature, and sex. Through them he learns how to drink, smoke a cigar, and have interrupted sex with a prostitute. In this way he learns the irreplaceable dissatisfaction of growing up.

One late spring he gets scarlet fever from rehearsing Goethe in the damp night at camp, and develops a heart murmur. His heart skips beats and so he and his mother decide to stay a few weeks at a sanatorium in the countryside. He'll read Proust, and she'll take up with her lover again. They greet with provincials who regard them as abundantly strange.

At the end of the sanatorium stay, mother and son celebrate Bastille day with the locals.

So mother and son trade fluids. What of that? She was drunk with wine and her body was aflame with remembrance of Sandro maybe, or of the time she made the decision to disappear forever. Instead she found her last true lover: her own son. He found in her the first true love. Sex for them was but a consequence of the cord that had once joined them. She sees in him the skipping of her heart that has long plagued her life; he sees in her the embodiment of every woman he would learn to know, the one woman he had proceeded from, who resisted at any event the call of bourgeois motherhood. She was irrepressibly a woman given over to her body, and he worshiped her for it. He dressed in her clothes, wore her makeup and smelled her lingerie; when she stood up from the bath he studied with objective savor the curve of the line that split her back, that extended down to her plump italianate buttocks. After catching him in the act of spying, momentarily the mother in her springs out and slaps him, but he looks up at her with a lover's defiance, a boy too quickly becoming a man.

Louis Malle also spent a time during his adolescence with his mother at a sanatorium; he too suffered a heart murmur. But it is more or less probable that in this film he fantasizes what it would have been like being another boy in another sanatorium sleeping next to Lea Massari.
...