Squid and the Whale has a couple of scenes taken from this film. The mom with the tennis instructor and the laying of his mother's underclothes on the bed while masterbating are obviously an hommage.
shareinteresting! ill have to watch this again, i didnt notice when i saw squid
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i've seen the laying the mother's clothes out on the bed/masturbation thing in a handful of movies now. the door in the floor is one i can think of and i'm positive there was another done very similarly as in murmur of the heart. i think this film was made the first out of them all though.
shareAll very interesting! I had noticed the tennis homage in The Squid and the Whale but not the laying out of the clothes. Never saw Burning Secret.
sharehmm i also missed the laying of the clothes (it reminded me of a scene in Irving's novel A Widow For One Year, though i don't remember seeing a similar scene in the movie adaptation The Door in the Floor)
anyway.. Squid and the Whales comes recommended, a great/similar film, indeed.
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Squid was a bit morose. But then again its the 21st century, it's hard not to be.
As for the Chevalier/Hotel Chevalier reference, Chevalier means Knight in french it is a very common name for things..
I've made a huge mistake.
It's interesting to see The Squid and the Whale mentioned here, because I also thought of The Squid and the Whale while watching Murmur of the Heart.
What got me thinking was a brief moment where Laurent parroted his father in a manner similar to one of the kids in The Squid and the Whale, I believe the older boy.
When Laurent parroted his dad's "overrated" declaration, I recalled the kid in The Squid and the Whale parroting the "it's a minor work" bit that he heard from his dad.
It's not like Murmur of the Heart is credited with the idea of a kid parroting a parent, but it was interesting how such a little thing caused my mind to make the reference.
And then thinking of the "minor work" part takes me to The Purple Rose of Cairo, where Jeff Daniels, the father in The Squid and the Whale, took exception to being called a minor character.
Funny how hearing one sentence can take the mind on a trip through a couple other movies.
The ironic thing is that coconuts are, in fact, migratory.
Both Squid and the Whale and Spanking the Monkey clearly take from this movie. All great films.
shareI hadn't seen The Squid and the Whale before seeing Murmur of the Heart, but I saw Spanking the Monkey right around the same time (don't recall which came first). I thought comparing the two was very illuminating. In Murmur of the Heart, the son recovers essentially immediately from the episode with his mother. In Spanking the Monkey, it destroys him. The reviewer who made mention that the things Laurent experiences would destroy the self esteem of an American kid is nearly spot-on I think. The neurotic things we force upon kids has consequence. It turns situations from minor problems into life-ruining traumas. American society hasn't faced the fact that they are responsible for a great deal of the harm children suffer when they have experiences that they're "not old enough" for. Just looking at other countries, its very easy to see that such things do not have any sort of fundamental capacity to do psychological harm, and that we invent it. The really sad part, aside from those whose life it ruins, is that the reasons for it are outdated and stupid. All of our anti-sex ideals stem from factory owners not wanting to pay adolescents enough that they could raise a family on.
One sociologically interesting thing about this film is when it was created. In the 70s, America was the progressive and liberal nation when it came to sexuality. France, on the other hand, was prudish and puritanical. There's a great book published in the 70s in France which advocates for liberalizing and making more rational the nations approach to sexuality, and they point at America as an example of the benefits. Its title is 'Good Sex Illustrated' and it reviews a set of sex education manuals the French government published for different age groups. The book pulls apart what those manuals actually taught, where those ideas came from, and why they are poisonous. It's very illuminating to read today in America, where the exact same sort of things are being used to manipulate and hurt people, especially the young.