Director: Louis Malle
Year Released: 1971
Rating: 4.0
Personal favorite that documents a young 14-year-old's path to sexual awareness, starting with some coded 'wrestling' with his brothers and a trip to the brothel - still, throughout, he keeps an eye on his promiscuous mother, who is running around on his gynecologist father. Malle always had a special way of looking at youth and its heartaches and nuances - as evident in Au Revoir, Les Enfants and Lacombe, Lucien - and this is among his finest movies - it works because it takes its twist seriously, as the 'shock' moment at the end could have very well have come across as being too flippant, yet Malle makes it seem convincing and beautiful - he wills the mother-son union to work, and the sequence is played so carefully it transcends the inherently sensational nature of the setup. I don't like making bold claims often, but the last twenty minutes (or so) of this - to me - rank among the greatest in cinema's history, as the young Oedipus goes from a drunken party to conquering Mother (who's on the rebound) to trying to bed a prudish blonde to ending up in the loving arms of luscious Daphne - who's always ready to go (ah, Daphne!) - to his final confrontation, which ends with neither castration nor eye-gouging, but laughter.
