★★★★ (out of 4 stars) This is an unusual family, especially by the standards of Dijon, France circa 1954. My father was a wealthy and successful doctor. He marries a girl 15 years his junior and, to make matters worse, Italian, much to the shock of his French bourgeois family. no matter what. The couple have three sons, and the film begins with the mother (in age and temperament) closer to them than the father. The film opens with a friendly family feud, and when it ends, we find out that Leia Massari is playing the mother. She looked more like a sister, and of course she was more of a friend than a mother to her children. Discipline of the family is in charge of a maid who is very plump and strong. The two eldest sons are mischievous bears, while the younger son is a thoughtful nerd. To be sure, his taste in reading extended to Henry Miller, Thad, and O's Tales, and the essence of his thinking was a conversation of confession. But he was a smart, quiet, likable kid. He was also in that emotional, sentimental moment of adolescence when he began to feel that sex was almost forever out of reach. Louis Mahler shows us the family in a series of brief and relatively independent scenes. Quarrels and truces, boys learn to smoke cigars, drink brandy, and fake paintings. The younger son is taken to a brothel by his older brothers (it turns out, this is to make him the victim of a cruel prank). The mother had an affair, but was not careful enough. The little boy was later found to have a heart murmur. He's going to a health resort for the summer, and his mother stays with him (and continues her affair). They booked an adjoining room in the hotel and then Mahler cleverly arranged the final scene for us so that the moment the incest happened seemed almost natural, not so much sensual as love, and nothing special meaning. I don't know how he achieved this effect; he turned the most controversial subject imaginable into simple emotions. Played by non-professional actor Benoit Ferrer, the boy's confusion about growing up and his homage to the possibilities in life reminds us of the young Jean- Pierre Leaud. The two films are worth comparing in many ways. And Curiosity isn't really about boys, it's about mothers. Leia Massari (you may remember her as the girl in Adventures) is so uninhibited, so irresponsible, so little girl, not adult, that her performance makes some An embarrassing scene becomes extremely magical.
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