Gachanja P Mwaura, University of Georgia Le Souffle au Coeur Louis Malle’s Le Souffle au Coeur (1971) is undoubtedly a provocative film. In it, an anarchistic adolescent not only satisfies the murkiest male fantasies imaginable but he actually does this while maintaining a remarkable degree of equanimity. It is a film in which the strictest Judeo-Christian ethos is repeatedly and deliberately transgressed, and what is even more amazing is that all is well at the end of it all. However, it is equally revealing to realize that Le Souffle au Coeur became a hit despite its aggressive attitude towards Western morals and censorship laws on both sides of the Atlantic. One is therefore tempted to infer that by violating his society’s darkest taboos and sneering at Roman Catholic rituals on the screen, Louis Malles successfully dares to question the genesis of certain Occidental moral practices and suggests a more globalist, relativistic outlook. In other words, although Malles is in no way justifying incest, he uses it to challenge the Western world to assess its perspectives in relation to other possibilities, other cultures and even certain “others” within a given society. He does this by unveiling the deceptions, phobias and complexes of the French bourgeoisie, his own social-economic class and therefore the one that he understands best. Moreover, Malles is able to castigate and challenge this class without losing his love for it. In this study, I intend to show that although Le Souffle au Coeur was shot in 1971, it is thematically rooted in the subversive, radical spirit that characterized the French New Wave, a cultural vogue which swept the French society in the 1950s and had far reaching consequences later. More specifically, I would like to explore the screen representation of the father figure in relation to the woman and an ideologically aggressive young male population in the France of the 1950s as it emerges in this film. It appears