Movie Type: Post-Noir (Modern Noir), Romantic Mystery
Themes: Cons and Scams, Femmes Fatales, Assumed Identities
Main Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Catherine Deneuve, Michel Bouquet, Nelly Borgeaud
Release Year: 1969
Country: FR/IT
Run Time: 123 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG
Plot
A rare mid-career flop for director François Truffaut when it was released, Mississippi Mermaid has become a cult favorite, thanks in part to the availability of the original French version, which added 13 minutes to the U.S. release running time. Adapted from a story by William Irish, it's a noirish tale of a man who orders a mail-order bride but receives instead a con woman. Louis Mahe (Jean-Paul Belmondo) owns a tobacco factory on the remote Indian Ocean island of Reunion. His bride, Julie Roussel (Catherine Deneuve), looks nothing like the photo she sent him, but she explains that she had forwarded a picture of a friend instead. After Louis allows Julie access to both his personal and company bank accounts, she disappears with most of his fortune. Heartbroken and bitter, he takes a holiday in the south of France and improbably spots "Julie" on a TV news story. When he tracks her down, she reveals her real name, Marion, and how she and her con-man boyfriend, Richard, had intercepted the real Julie on the boat Mississippi that was headed for Reunion. Richard threw Julie off the ship and Marion assumed her identity, but once the two thieves returned to France, Richard made off with the money. Marion professes that she fell in love with Louis, and he believes her. They try to make a life together in France, but a private detective whom Louis and Julie's sister, Berthe, had hired to find Marion, tracks them down to a house they have rented in Aix en Provence, forcing them to go on the run. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Review
Though it features the most attractive screen couple François Truffaut ever worked with and a love-conquers-all story, Mississippi Mermaid is also one of the darker films in the Truffaut canon. Louis (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a tough businessman with the soul of a romantic, while Marion (Catherine Deneuve) is a hard-bitten realist who's living from one scam to another. Louis' belief in love offers Marion a safe refuge, but the two also know that they can live together only by trying to outrun her sordid past. "Before I met you," Louis tells her, "I thought life was simple, but now I know it's not." This declaration occurs even before Louis is forced to kill a man to protect their freedom. Like Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou, which also featured Belmondo, Truffaut's film forces the viewer to root for a couple on the lam, a staple of the film noirs that Truffaut and Godard cut their filmgoing teeth on as teenagers. Truffaut's film, shot in glorious wide-screen color in beautiful locations, doesn't look like a noir, but when Louis admits to his business partner, "I can't say I'm happy with her, but I know that I'm unable to live without her," you know that he's got it bad and that ain't good. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide
Marcel Berbert - Jardine; Martine Ferrière - Landlady; Roland Thénot - Richard
Credit
Jean-Jose Richer - First Assistant Director, François Truffaut - Director, Agnès Guillemot - Editor, Antoine Duhamel - Composer (Music Score), Michel Deruelle - Makeup, Claude Pignot - Production Designer, Denys Clerval - Cinematographer, Claude Miller - Production Manager, Marcel Berbert - Producer, Claude Pignot - Set Designer, René Levert - Sound/Sound Designer, François Truffaut - Screenwriter, Yves Saint Laurent - Costume/Wardrobe, Cornell Woolrich - Book Author
Truffaut juggles an Hitchcockian suspense/thriller with deepening sexual obsession. Louis (Jean-Paul Belmondo) owns a tobacco plantation and cigarette factory on Réunion Island, but it's lonely work — so he sends away for a mail-order bride.
Much to his surprise, the beautiful young Julie Roussel (Catherine Deneuve) arrives by ship (the Mississippi Mermaid of the title), looking nothing like the picture he had received by mail. Louis quickly falls for Julie, while discovering that she is decidedly not the woman with whom he had been corresponding.
When the film was exhibited in San Francisco in 1999, film critic Edward Guthmann lauded the film in a review, 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."[2]
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."[3]
