Customer Reviews

Mississippi Mermaid

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If on one hand, "La Sirène du Mississipi" is not Truffaut's best, on the other, it is much better than many films we see nowadays -- say, the quasi-remake of this, called "Original Sin", starring Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas. Both films are based on Willian Irish's --or, if you will, Cornell Woolrich's -- "Waltz into Darkness". But the similarities end here. While Truffaut is an exercise of style and good taste, the other, directed by Michael Cristofer, is so meaningless that is almost vulgar.

The plot is very simple, but at the same time catching. A man from Reunion Island orders a mail bride. When he meets her, she turns up to be more beautiful and dangerous than described in the letters and shown in the photos. He imedeately falls for her, and apparently so does she. We, and so does he, learn that she is not really what she meant to be. The film has some fine and exciting twists that keep you wondering what would come next.

Catherine Deneuve plays the femme fatale. She comes fresh from Buñuel's "La Belle du Jour", where she has already exercised and improved her glacial blonde side. Here, she goes a bit further, including a bit more of dissimulantion. Not only is she beautiful, but also, very effective as the woman who can dissimulate love. Jean Paul Belmondo plays a very different character from those he had been cast for. He is a bit silly and weak. So the whole relationship is dominated by her, once she is very strong and persuasive. One clear example of this is when they are buying a car. He is sure he wants the silver one, that would be more discreet, but she wants the red one... guess which one they buy! So, don't be fooled, this is a Catherine Deneuve's show. She is dazzingly in her Yves Saint-Laurent. She dominates the frames in every scene she is in! And even some she is out.

Another thing, many people may not understand the difference between "tu" and "vous" in this film. It is not a mistake! The writer meant to show different periods in their relationship. When they are close --things are fine-- they use `tu', but sometimes they use `vous', particulary, after spending a time apart-- this means how distant from each other --as a strange -- they became.

Truffaut's work is as always very effective and very creative. In the very beginning he does an homage to Jean Renoir, using some footage of his "La Marseillase" introducing Reunion Island. Although this film is meant to be a thriller, in the end, it is much more a love story. A tragic love story of a love that probably shouldn't have happened. We also have to notice how hidden and subtle the sexuality is, in this movie -- as in most of Truffaut's woks. Some of his films may be virtually sexless, but if you watch it very close, you will see sparkles of love everywhere.

As a devoted fan of François Truffaut, every film he made, interests me. This "Mississipi Mermaid" makes no exeception. It is intriguing, interesting and disturbing. "Love hurts?", somebody asks in the film. "Yes, it does, when I look at you, you are so beautiful that hurts me. [...] it is a joy and a suffering". As most of his movies: they are a joy, but they also hurt us, once they show how human nature and love can be.

Although Mississippi Mermaid was considered one of Truffaut's losers, it has charm and the personalities of the characters will stay with you. It's clearly better than its reputation. Said to be influenced by Hitchcock and then rendered in the Truffautian style, it is a little off the beaten track, and the coincidences are a little ridiculous. Nonetheless Catherine Deneuve is outstanding and strangely at home in a role considered by many to be out of character for her, as though Grace Kelly might play Bonnie in "Bonnie and Clyde." This comes five years after Deneuve charmed audiences in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), and two years after her success in Belle de Jour (1967). She stars here as a skanky ex-home girl with a murderous heart... For all her elegant beauty Deneuve does manage to look cheap and almost sleazy. In some ways she comes to life in this role more than in any other I've seen. Certainly I've never seen her sexier.

Co-star Jean-Paul Belmondo is engaging as a slightly sweet and naive tobacco farmer from Reunion Island (near Madagascar) who gets Deneuve as a mail order bride, she and her bad boyfriend having first dumped the real mail order bride overboard en route. If you've never seen Belmondo you should since he was a sensation in his prime, something like a French Marlon Brando.

This film involves the story of a man seeking his "perfect mate" by means of an ad she has placed in a newspaper. He lives on a lonely island in the Indian Ocean (Reunion, once a French colony) and the woman, played by Catherine Deneuve, is from Paris, supposedly. At first the two exchange a series of letters, so as to "get to know one another," and eventually the woman agrees to travel to Reunion to meet the man. He happens to be a wealthy tobacco farmer, and the owner of a cigarette factory, which makes him moderately wealthy. Upon meeting each other in person they appear somewhat uncomfortable with the circumstances, as if niether quite expected what they find. The woman seems to remember little from her correspondance. When sharing his experiences with business partners the man gets less-than-lukewarm responses from his close associates. Despite these peculiar circumstances and an absolute abscence of anything near intimacy the plans for a wedding go forward. Shortly afterward the woman's behavior becomes gradually more bizarre, until finally she disappears altogether, having taken the man's fortune with her. The man's pusuit for this woman, now his wife, follows. We learn he is pursuing more than just a thief; he pursues her as love-object as well, ending up in shady dance halls along the French Riviera, where she is working. Eventually the truth bocomes known, a kind of love between the two develops, and Catherine Deneuve's character as a victim just as much as a victimizer becomes known. All in all I do not think it is one of her best performances. Where the film succeeds at all is in it's underlying message for persons seeking fulfilling relationships by means of classified "personals." In this respect I think Truffaut was ahead of his time.

The story is entertaining enough, but there is not much joy from viewing this DVD. The problem is that the folks producing it apparently were trying to win the contest for the DVD having the world's squattest image. It is EXTREMELY letterboxed WITHIN a 16:9 widescreen format. Even your zoom function won't help you, because the producers moved the subtitles into the black-bar region (and the subtitles are about 2/3 the height of the image itself. The movie becomes simply uninvolving when you see low-resolution images on a thin ribbon across the screen.

"Julie, you are adorable," says Louis Mahe (Jean-Paul Belmondo) to his beautiful new mail-order bride, Julie Rousel (Catherine Deneuve). "Do you know what that means? `Adorable'. It means worthy of adoration." Louis is a wealthy tobacco grower and cigarette manufacturer on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. When Julie arrived on the island, she didn't look like the photograph she had sent him when she agreed to be his wife. She says she was timid and decided to send the photograph of her sister. Louis is enchanted by her beauty and understands her caution. They marry, and Louis becomes a husband deeply happy. He tells her she is worthy of adoration just a day or two after he arranges to change his personal and business accounts into joint accounts. That evening, Julie has disappeared, cleaning out both accounts. Louis goes to France, has a breakdown, and then by chance sees Julie in a newscast about a new nightclub and the women there who are hostesses. Louis learns she is really a woman named Marion Vergano. Marion's history would lead only the most obsessed of men to think a happy ending could be in the cards. Most of the movie places us in France after Louis has found her and accepted her as Marion Vergano

Mississippi Mermaid, written and directed by Francois Truffaut, is a movie of Louis' obsession, of sexual psychosis, of parasitic selfishness, of stolen identity and of rat poison, with a lot of self-revealing (some of it even true) dialogue thrown in. As much as I think comparing one director to another is usually pointless, in this case Truffaut may have watched Vertigo, Psycho and Marnie once too often. Still, murder at the top of the stairs, the star power of Deneuve and Belmondo and some eccentric passing opinions (Louis thinks Johnny Guitar is "a love story, with lots of feeling in it."), all handled with Truffaut's characteristic confidence isn't something to pass by. The downside is that Mississippi Mermaid, despite all of its advantages, at times veers too close to melodramatic parody.

"You mustn't cry, my dear. It's your happiness I want, not your tears."

"I'm learning what love is, Louis. It's painful. It hurts me." It sounds better in French, but the meaning is just as soppy.

Truffaut adapted his movie from the pulp mystery novel, Waltz into Darkness, by Cornell Woolrich writing as William Irish. The movie didn't do too well the first time out, but then underwent a rediscovery of sorts. Unfortunately, that meant articles by people who teach film studies at universities. One such person wrote, "[Mississippi Mermaid] remains a fascinating exploration of the major themes essayed by movie melodramas of betrayal - a sort of distillation of the amoral nucleus of Double Indemnity and the wilder settings of Key Largo." Distillation of the amoral nucleus? I don't even know what an amoral nucleus is. The salient point, for me, is that films such as Double Indemnity and Key Largo are above all else tightly told stories. I think Truffaut with Mississippi Mermaid started with a nice, nasty, obsessional pulp tale, but then tried to do too much with it.

The DVD is not anamorphic. The transfer is nothing special. There are no extras.

I have not seen the DVD. I saw the classic Mermaid on its initial run in the theatres, and the impression continues to haunt me 30 years later. I attribute the impact almost entirely to Mlle Deneuve's diabolical portrait of an utterly lost soul. Of her massive cannon of femme noir performances (spanning nearly half a century), her brilliant, ongoing exhibition of the dark side of the "eternal feminine", none is quite as disturbing, as that of the icily vapid Julie, the heartless, mindless, psychotic and inevitably homocidal/suicidal 'substitute' mail order bride.

In the Mermaid, which followed Belle de Jour and Repulsion in forming the foundation of Deneuve's introduction to an international audience (she'd been making films in France since the tender age of 13), Deneuve's character approaches the sub-human, becomming a sort of cosmic "black-hole" into which her victims (male) are helplessly drawn in a haze romantic self-asserting ignorance, an archeology of a long-lost maenidic fury, or prehensile feminist epistemology, which, under the mature Truffaut's direction and Deneuve's characteristic restraint is played out in grave measures, a ponderous, agonizing, inexorable procession through a slough of despair to dissolution. If Mlle Deneuve et al. have succeeded in creating a character "rotton to her xx chromosone core", they have imparted something crucial about our humanity or lack thereof. For this reason, I rate the Mermaid not as merely good, but great, albeit uncomfortably great, which is perhaps why, it has always been consigned by critics to that dubious category of "flawed masterpieces". But it's worth the price, if for nothing more than to see Deneuve as a flaming redhead.

The story is entertaining enough, but there is not much joy from viewing this DVD. The problem is that the folks producing it apparently were trying to win the contest for the DVD having the world's squattest image. It is EXTREMELY letterboxed WITHIN a 16:9 widescreen format. Even your zoom function won't help you, because the producers moved the subtitles into the black-bar region (and the subtitles are about 2/3 the height of the image itself. The movie becomes simply uninvolving when you see low-resolution images on a thin ribbon across the screen.

Begining rather unobtrusively, Louis (Belmondo) and Julie (Deneuve) meet for the first time after falling in love through the mail. It appears a rather normal French love tale, but soon Julie begins to show signs that there is more than meets the eye with her.

When she disappears one day, he discovers several things about her. He travels from his island off the coast of Africa to France to find her and falls ill on the journey. He finds her soon after and they begin again as if nothing happened. Louis falls effortlessly into her dark world, doing acts he would never have even thought about committing and soon they are on the run.

Truffaut shows us that under the right, or wrong circumstances any of us would do for the love of our life(especially if she is Catherine Deneuve). The thing I really loved about the film is Truffaut's subtle way of conveying the emotions of the charcters. When their love is going well it's bright and cheery, lots of yellows and sunshine, when it is going awry the colors are dark and the shadows are everywhere.

This is a unique film about love and redemption. Both Deneuve and Belmondo give wonderful performances in a classic piece of noire from the genuis that was Francios Truffaut.

Both Francois Truffaut's "Mississippi Mermaid" and Michael Cristopher's "Original Sin" are based on the same Cornell Woolrich pot-boiler novel. Truffaut's version is a relatively bloodless affair especially since his stars, Catherine Deneuve and Jean Paul Belmondo play their roles as if they are slumming in "meler-dramer" country: they're much too polite and just plain cold, frigid even in their respective roles as Julie Roussel(really Julie Vergano) and Louis. Deneuve, of course is woefully miscast as Julie but Belmondo, on paper at least, must have seemed ideal as the kind, sexy, considerate, obsessed Louis. What happened? Though Truffaut was/is considered a director of the highest order, he doesn't have the requisite, particular passion to bring this very American story to life. For the same reason, if it were not for Jeanne Moreau's elegant, persuassive performance, his faux Hitchcock "The Bride wore Black" would have also been a failure.
In the new version "Original Sin," both Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas make Julie and Louis breathe with a life force that sets the screen on fire in a sexy, sweaty swirl of passion. These are not subtle roles....they need to played over-the-top. And this is what this material needs: not polite reverence but wild abandon.
Does this mean that Cristopher is a better director than Truffaut? No. Just better suited to the material, in this case.
On the other hand, Truffaut is a master and as such there are sublime passages in "Mississippi Mermaid," especially the scenes of obsession involving Louis and Julie's under clothing. But... Mermaid is a fascinating, beautiful failure but a failure nonetheless.

"Mississippi Mermaid" (1969), is a French film, written and directed by famed director Francois Truffaut( Francois Truffaut's Adventures of Antoine Doinel (The 400 Blows / Antoine & Collette / Stolen Kisses / Bed & Board / Love on the Run) - Criterion Collection). It is an odd little noir melodrama, a crime/drama/romance, said to have been influenced by the famous British-American film director Alfred Hitchcock, that has the privilege of presenting two of the greatest stars of contemporary French cinema, Jean Paul Belmondo (Breathless - Criterion Collection) and Catherine Deneuve(The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; Belle de Jour) in its leading roles. It is based on the novel Waltz into Darkness (Crime, Penguin) by well-known American mystery/thriller author Cornell Woolrich, writing as William Irish, and was dedicated to famed French film director Jean Renoir. It's not considered one of Truffaut's greatest pictures, but it has its moments.

The picture is set in the little-known French island of Reunion, near Madagascar, off Africa. Belmondo, who looks very uncomfortable in suit and tie, plays Louis Mahe, a sweet but slightly naïve, successful businessman who owns tobacco fields and a cigar factory. He is awaiting, when the picture opens, Julie Roussel as a mail order bride, whom he knows only from her letters. When she arrives, aboard the ship "Mississippi Mermaid," she arrives in the person of the stunning Deneuve, and is much more beautiful, and quite different, than he expected. His life thereafter will take quite a few unexpected turns, most of them for the worst.

"Mississippi Mermaid" gives us perhaps the best look we will ever get at the island of Reunion. We also get to see some of southern France, the Riviera, Paris, and snowbound Switzerland. It is a treat to look at the two stars in their gorgeous young primes, and their acting, as well as that of the rest of the cast, is quite acceptable. Deneuve was less cold, and more sexy, certainly more skanky, than her usual persona. Belmondo, once freed of his earlier Reunion-bound persona, is able to loosen up and inhabit the emotions his character develops, as the pair develop a reality-based relationship. Not the greatest French movie by a long shot, more a footnote curiosity, but worth seeing for fans of director or stars.