After a winter chuck full of dark, cold days, spring is welcome indeed. Without any disruptions this year (in Kansas, my sister reported a spring snow storm that froze daffodils), bulbs, shrubs and trees have taken their turn showing off their reproductive strategies. Tulips are still opening but the daffodils, except the late-blooming varieties, are crunchy paper-thin ghosts. The almond trees are starting to show green under all that white efflorescence, cherries weeping and laughing endure. In the garden, the tree tulip bears just four buds. During the winter, snow removal chopped off two main branches and the tree is now busy sprouting new shoots from the ground for next year. I am raring to get me a new rosemary bush for the deck. Rosemary-and-sage roast fowl beckons, as well as rosemary-scented lamb and pork chops on the grill.
Last night I watched Louis Malle's Le souffle au coeur (Murmur of the Heart, 1971), which does not refer to the boy, Laurent Chevalier's rheumatoid heart ailment that led to his stay at a sanatorium with his mother, Clara. It refers to the fifteen year old's coming-of-age when France was struggling to hold on to its Indochinese possessions. It depicts Freud's Oedipal complex but without today's strum und angst over sexual abuse rattling the West and the Catholic Church. After their night together, Clara, the mother, tells her son: "This won't happen again but we'll both think of this night with tenderness, not with remorse or guilt."
Malle who also directed another of my favorite movies, Dinner with André, created a masterpiece of nuance, images of a bygone era and of how things used to be tender now just crass and obscene. It depicts a Europe that even today holds a mirror to America showing how we here in the New World have much to learn from the old when it came to the truly profound human values that characterize the West. I'll be looking for more Malle-directed movies and when I do make my own will remember this movie for its delicate images and tenderness.
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