An onslaught of movies by the French director Louis Malle will be hitting Seattle theaters next week, thanks to the buffing many of his films have received on their way to becoming DVDs. A few of the DVDs, however, have gotten here first: Criterion has released three of Malle's most unimpeachable works in a lovely four-disc box set.

Murmur of the Heart is a coming-of-age picture (all of these films are, in their own ways) of the incest subgenre. At first, it's hard to believe the movie was made in 1971. It has so much of the '50s in it, and I'm not just talking about the setting. Or the main character Laurent Chevalier (Benoît Ferreux), a cute rascal in short pants who nicks bop records and peruses existentialist novels. It's the way the characters seem to suck in Freud along with their oxygen. You know there's going to be trouble when Laurent's sexy mom (Lea Massari) chases him through bedrooms in a state of (could it be calculated?) dishabille. But then—and here's why it's definitely a '70s movie after all, having needed the chance not only to gnaw on but to digest the Freud—the Oedipal subtext devours the narrative whole and runs away with the plot. Which is to say, the boy and his mom have sex. What's great about Murmur of the Heart is the way the headlong pitch toward taboo comes slicked with both the hot whine of Charlie Parker and the traditional healing waters of a provincial spa. I only wish there were commentary to track the descent, rather than a slightly stupid essay by Michael Sragow.

The only movie that hadn't been previously released on video in the U.S., Lacombe, Lucien is a self-flagellating exploration of the temptations that led French citizens to collaborate with the German occupation during World War II. Of course, the temptations are a bit obvious: money, loot, wine, women. And the quality that leads one 18-year-old farm boy named Lucien (Pierre Blaise) to veer from potential Resistance fighter to full-fledged Nazi punk is a bit obvious too: natural-born thuggery. It's hard to draw any conclusions from his story, but it's easy to become darkly fascinated by Lucien.

The most perfect, and most famous, of the films, Au Revoir les Enfants is a gentle, semi-autobiographical story full of fearsome facts. Julien Quentin is the Louis Malle character, a student (again with the short pants) at a Catholic boarding school in the countryside (again with the Occupied France) where the priests are openly hostile to the German occupiers. Several new students, including one Jean Bonnet (né Kippelstein) are hurriedly matriculated at the school, and soon Jean and Julien are fast friends. Julien soon catches onto Jean's secret, but he can't quite make sense of its meaning. "Are we Jewish?" he asks his mother. It's one of the most poignant and least sentimental Holocaust movies I've ever seen.