Mississippi Mermaid

Mississippi Mermaid
French theatrical release poster
Directed by	François Truffaut
Produced by	Marcel Berbert François Truffaut
Written by	François Truffaut William Irish
Starring	Catherine Deneuve Jean-Paul Belmondo
Music by	Antoine Duhamel
Cinematography	Denys Clerval
Editing by	Agnès Guillemot
Distributed by	United Artists
Release date(s)	18 June 1969 (France) 10 April 1970 (USA)
Running time	123 minutes
Country	France
Language	French
Budget	$1,600,000

Mississippi Mermaid (French: La sirène du Mississipi) is a 1969 French romantic drama film directed by François Truffaut and starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Adapted from the 1947 novel Waltz into Darkness by Cornell Woolrich, the film is about a tobacco planter on Réunion island in the Indian Ocean who becomes engaged through correspondence to a woman he does not know. When she arrives it is not the same woman in the photo, but he marries her anyway.^[1] Filmed in southern France and Réunion island,^[2] Mississippi Mermaid was the 17th highest grossing film of the year in France with a total of 1,221,027 admissions.^[3] It was remade in 2001 as Original Sin, directed by Michael Cristofer and starring Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas.

Plot

Louis Mahé (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a wealthy tobacco plantation owner on Réunion island in the Indian Ocean, is awaiting the arrival of his bride to be, Julie Roussel (Catherine Deneuve), whom he's never met. They became aquainted through the personals column of a French newspaper and have been corresponding by mail. At the Hotel Mascarin he meets his partner Jardine who accompanies him to pick up the ring. Louis drives to the dock to greet Julie who is arriving on the steamer Mississippi from Nouméa, the capital of New Caledonia. When they meet he is surprised by her beauty and does not recognize her; she is not the woman in the photo she'd sent him. She explains that she sent her sister's photo to assure the sincerity of his intentions. He confesses that he too has not told the complete truth, having hid the fact that he was wealthy.

Louis and Julie quickly marry, and his adoration of his new bride makes him overlook inconsistencies with what she wrote in her letters. He gives Julie access to his bank accounts and plans to print her image on the cigarette packs his company manufactures. After receiving an angry letter from Julie's sister, Berthe Roussel (Nelly Borgeaud), demanding to know the whereabouts of Julie, Louis returns home to find that Julie is gone, and that she's absconded with nearly 28 million francs, emptying his bank accounts. Soon after, Louis meets Julie's sister Berthe who informs him that the woman he married was not Julie, and that she saw her sister board the Mississippi. They hire a private detective, Comolli, to track down the impostor and bring her to justice.

On a flight to Nice, Louis is suddenly collapses from exhaustion. While recuperating in the Clinique Heurtebise sanitarium, he sees Julie on television, dancing at a nightclub in Antibes. He buys a gun and travels to Antibes where he breaks in her room at the Hotel Monorail, intent on killing her. When she returns and is confronted by Louis, she offers no resistance. Explaining that her real name is Marion Vergano, she tells him of her sordid past, of the years she spent in prison and of her association with a heartless gangster, Richard, who was with her on the Mississippi. She recounts that when they met Julie Roussel and learned of her forthcoming marriage, Richard fabricated a plot to kill Julie and send Marion in her place to rob Louis. Afterwards Richard forced her to go through with the robbery. She tells Louis that she still loves him, and Louis forgives her.

Louis and Marion buy a red convertable and drive to Aix-en-Provence where they move into a house together and spend their days traveling the region and making love. Their happiness is interrupted, however, by Comolli, who has arrived in Aix on the trail of the imposter. After trying in vain to bribe the detective to drop the case, Louis shoots him dead and buries him in the wine cellar of their house. Louis and Marion flee to Lyon, but she grows increasingly dissatisfied with their fugitive existence and longs for a life of luxury in Paris. Louis returns briefly to Réunion and sells his share in the plantation to his partner Jardine. Upon his return he finds the police are on their trail. Again they are forced to flee, leaving most of his money behind.

They head into the mountains where they find an isolated cabin in which to hide. They hope to cross over into Switzerland, but Marion is restless and unhappy with their life on the run. Louis becomes increasingly ill, and after nearly collapsing, he suspects that Marion has been putting rat poison in his coffee. He attempts to escape, but Marion brings him back to the cabin. As she pours him another glass of coffee, he reveals his knowledge of her plan, accepts his fate with no regrets, and expresses his overwhelming love for her. Ashamed at her actions, Marion knocks the glass from Louis' hand and vows to make amends. She acknowledges that no woman deserves to be loved like this, but she assures him that she loves him and that they can still go away together. Crying in his arms, Marion tells him, "I'm learning what love is, Louis. It's painful." After Louis regains his strength, they leave the cabin behind them in a snow storm and head off together toward the border.

Cast

• Jean-Paul Belmondo as Louis Mahé
• Catherine Deneuve as Julie Roussel / Marion Vergano
• Nelly Borgeaud as Berthe
• Martine Ferrière as Landlady
• Marcel Berbert as Jardine
• Yves Drouhet as Detective
• Michel Bouquet as Comolli
• Roland Thénot as Richard^[4]

Production

Filming locations

• Aix-en-Provence, Bouches-du-Rhône, France
• Antibes, Alpes-Maritimes, France
• Grenoble, Isère, France
• Le Tampon, Réunion
• Lyon, Rhône, Rhône-Alpes, France
• Nice, Alpes-Maritimes, France
• Saint Denis, Réunion
• Sainte Anne, Réunion
• Sainte Suzanne, Réunion^[2]

Reception

In his review in The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote that the film "defies easy definition and blithely triumphs over what initially appears to be structural schizophrenia."^[5] Canby noted the performances of Belmondo, Deneuve, and Bouquet, which were "played with marvelous style."^[5] Canby concluded:

In Mississippi Mermaid, as in all of Truffaut's films, love leads only to an uncertain future that, at best, may contain some joy along with the inevitable misery. Truffaut's special talent, however, is for communicating a sense of the value of that joy.^[5]

In his review in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, film critic Edward Guthmann praised the film, writing:

Truffaut tells his story with terrific dispatch, as if he was thrilled by its possibilities and couldn't wait to share his enthusiasm ... the result is a cool combo of film noir, star vehicle and picaresque romance. It's vintage Truffaut, and a great way to get acquainted or reacquainted with one of cinema's true masters.^[6]

The film, however, had many detractors. Dennis Schwartz, for example, wrote:

This perverse love story just doesn't fly. The two leads play unsympathetic characters and instead of getting into their character's heads they both play it as a game. It comes off as a disturbing film that seems pointless and has questionable entertainment value. It's one of the few misfires from the talented Truffaut, even with the restored 13 minutes missing from its American release that supposedly makes the film more lucid.^[7]

On the review aggregator web site Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an 85% positive rating from top film critics based on 13 reviews, and a 71% positive audience rating based on 2,387 user ratings.^[8]

References

Citations

Further reading

External links

• Mississippi Mermaid at the Internet Movie Database
• Mississippi Mermaid at the TCM Movie Database
• Mississippi Mermaid at AllRovi
• Mississippi Mermaid at Rotten Tomatoes
• Mississippi Mermaid at Box Office Mojo

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