MISSISSIPPI MERMAID Movie Review

Le Sirene du Mississippi

François Truffaut's dark romance about a plantation owner (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who sends for a mail-order bride and ends up with the very special delivery of Catherine Deneuve was indifferently received by critics and largely ignored by audiences (the dubbed version shown in many American cities was no help). The film's neglect is tragic, however, because Mississippi Mermaid—based on a novel by Rear Window author Cornell Woolrich—is one of the most delicately shaded, moving, and personal films of Truffaut's career. Belmondo's love for the duplicitous, ice-cold woman who cleans him out of everything except his passion for her is an early version of what would ultimately become the obsessive mania depicted in Truffaut's masterpiece, The Story of Adele H. Mississippi Mermaid is the converse of David Mamet's House of Games, in which broken trust instantly reshapes love into hate. Here, it's just another obstacle that makes an inevitable journey toward a common destiny take a little longer; it's foreplay, like the brief moment in the film in which Belmondo's arrival home prompts Deneuve to quickly put on her stockings before lying down on his bed, just to give him the pleasure of taking them off of her. If the sadomasochistic bond at the center of this heartbreaking and complex movie seems inexplicable, consider the film's dedication, which is to Jean Renoir. It was Renoir who wrote that “the terrible thing about this world is that everybody has his reasons.”

NEXT STOP … La Chienne, The Soft Skin, The Woman Next Door

1969 (PG) 1 lOm/C FR IT Jean-Paul Belmondo, Catherine Deneuve, Michel Bouquet, Nelly Borgeaud, Marcel Berbert, Martine Ferriere; D: Francois Truffaut; W: Francois Truffaut; C: Denys Clerval; M: Antoine Duhamel. VHS, LV, Letterbox MGM, FCT