Thursday Movie Picks: Forbidden Love (Romance Tropes Edition)

 

For the seventh week of 2021 as part of Wandering Through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks. We go into the third week of the Romance Tropes Edition in the subject of forbidden love. Love that is considered wrong or taboo but for the people involved, it feels right and dangerous. Then, there’s those affairs that are just absolutely wrong. Here are my three picks as they’re all directed by the late, great Louis Malle:

1. Murmur of the Heart

Malle’s 1971 coming-of-age film set in postwar France revolves around a young teenage boy discovering sex while being really attached to his mother due to the fact that he’s treated almost indifferently by his father. It’s a compelling yet offbeat film from Malle that showcases a boy and his mother both dealing with their own issues as they spend time at a hotel/sanatorium due to the boy’s health while his mother tries to find fun. Alas, things become troubling and really fucked up to say the least though its ending is actually more endearing than eerie.

2. Pretty Baby

The film that introduced the world to Brooke Shields is a film that wouldn’t be made today considering that it does feature a nude yet underage Shields in the film as the daughter of a prostitute who would become one herself. Yet, the creepy aspect of the film involves Shields and Keith Carradine where the latter is a photographer who wants to help her but is also in love with her. It is an amazing film but one that not many people would want to see as it is creepy and also unsettling in terms of its subject matter.

3. Damage

Malle’s penultimate film about a politician who falls and begins an affair with his son’s new fiancée is a more conventional film from Malle yet it does feature amazing performances from Jeremy Irons, Juliette Binoche, and a well-deserving Oscar nominated performance from Miranda Richardson as Irons’ wife. It is one of Malle’s lesser films but it is still this compelling drama about an affair that shouldn’t have happened and the implications that it brings to a man and his obsession with this affair with a woman who is to be his daughter-in-law.

© thevoid99 2021