Mississippi Mermaid (1969): Truffaut’s Misunderstood Tale of Mystery and Erotic Obsession (Review)

Released to Blu-ray by Radiance Films this week is Mississippi Mermaid, a 1969 Hitchcockian thriller from François Truffaut that tells of an obsessive love affair between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve.

By the late 1960s, Truffaut had long since earnt his spurs as an acclaimed auteur within the French New Wave movement thanks to his success with The 400 Blows in 1959. Nevertheless, the 1960s had not been kind to him – for every success like Jules and Jim (1962), there had been disappointments such as Fahrenheit 451 (1966), which led critics and audiences to wonder if the filmmaker was simply not cut out for more mainstream success. But 1968 proved to be a very good year for Truffaut. Bouyed by the good notices he had recieved for Stolen Kisses – the second sequel to The 400 Blows, reuniting the director with Jean-Pierre Léaud as his character, Antoine Doinel – and The Bride Wore Black, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Cornell Woolrich (the author behind the story that his beloved Hitchcock turned into Rear Window in 1954) Truffaut now found himself in an enviable position for his next project, and may well have considered Woolrich something of a lucky charm. Could lightning strike twice? Faced with the goodwill of the studios, critics and audiences, gifted a budget of over $1m and the prospect of filming in locations ranging from a sun-kissed island in the Indian Ocean to the snow-capped French Alps, and with A-list stars to call upon, Truffaut turned his attentions to Woolrich’s 1947 novel Waltz into Darkness and set about adapting it as Mississippi Mermaid, which he dedicated to Jean Renoir.

The film tells the story of Louis (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a wealthy tobacco plantation owner on the small island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, who places a classified advertisement in the newspaper for a bride. Answering the call is Julie (Catherine Deneuve), a woman who steps off the passenger boat Mississippi looking more luminous than her photograph suggested. Enraptured by her beauty and charms, Louis overlooks such inconsistencies and the pair are duly and swiftly wed. Things appear happy for a while but complications ensue when Louis receives a letter from Julie’s sister in France demanding to know of her whereabouts and why she hasn’t corresponded with her since leaving for Réunion. When Julie suddenly disappears the following day, Louis learns that she has emptied his bank account. When the sister arrives and confirms that Louis’ bride is not Julie, he is determined to find the beautiful con-woman and exact his revenge. Arriving in France, he is quickly consumed by an erotic obsession for her that sets him on a path of homicide and masochistic desire.

Unfortunately, despite having what appeared to be a winning hand, Truffaut’s film was met with harsh criticism from the critics and from some quarters of the audience. Even today, a common complaint directed at Mississippi Mermaid that the motivations of its protagonists are wildly illogical, implausible or just plain unknowable. Whilst others cite tonal inconsistencies and the miscasting of Belmondo as reasons for Truffaut’s failure.

I’m not about to claim that Mississippi Mermaid is a perfect film, but I do feel that the criticism is unfair and wonder even if some of Truffaut’s intentions have not been understood. It’s true that the behaviour and actions of Louis, as he succumbs willingly to the siren call of the woman he believed to be Jane, are wildly implausible; would a seemingly sane man really fall so head over heels for a woman who has robbed him of everything, ruined his life forever and even compelled him to commit murder? Well, no perhaps not. But I think some of the grievances regarding this seem to forget that this is a film, not a documentary. More, it is a film adaptation of a potboiler thriller novel from the 1940s. Logic and rationality goes out of the window, surely? Indeed, I can’t see much difference here between Louis and any other doomed male protagonist who has fell under the spell of a femme fatale in any number of classic and much revered film noirs you’d care to mention. As such, I am at a loss as to why it is a stumbling block for some audiences.

Many may quibble that the ultra-macho Belmondo is the problem, that it is hard to be persauded that someone like him would lose all sense and appear so weak and easily influenced by the character of Jane. Indeed, it has been reported that Belmondo felt ill at ease portraying such a character and that Truffaut had to gift him the moment in the movie which sees him, the Tom Cruise of his day, performing his own dangerous stunt of scaling the apartment building that Deneuve is hiding out in, as a concession to his more action-orientated screen persona. But I think these critics are missing the point. Truffaut could have cast anybody as the masochistic, lovesick Louis. He could have cast someone like Jean-Pierre Léaud for example, someone who would physically be far more convincing in such a part. That he chose Belmondo to portray a role so against type just had to be deliberate.

The truth is, I think Truffaut isn’t intending us to take Mississippi Mermaid all that seriously. I think he knows that Woolrich’s source material and the obsessional romantic noirs featuring the dame with a past and the guy with no future are all bunkem. Yes they’re fun, he seems to be saying, but they’re also really silly too, and so the film sometimes appears tonally uneven simply because he’s asking us to share not only his fondness for the genre, but also his ability to roll his eyes at their heightened and oh-so-earnestly delivered clichés. This is why he uses cinematic devices like crops and iris out fades, captions announcing the city of “Lyon” in bold red and even bolder musical accompaniment, and even a map overlaid over the picture to denote the journey Louis is taking complete with a dotted line for his trajectory. This is why he chooses to emasculate France’s most macho of film stars, and it is why, in Catherine Deneuve he outdoes Hitchcock’s stereotypical icy blonde.

If Mississippi Mermaid has one criticism I can agree with however, it’s that the film has no handle whatsover on the deeply unpredictable character of “Jane” as portrayed by Deneuve. It’s perhaps telling that the only insight we gain is handled so clumsily in a scene that literally captures her seated in a booth and recording her feelings for Louis onto vinyl for posterity. Now, I haven’t read the original novel Waltz into Darkness, but I am led to believe that it is a deeply misogynist affair, so I suspect that this is a failing to be found within its pages as much as it is in Truffaut’s adaptation. With that truth regarding its origins in mind, I guess we have to give Truffaut some credit for not making his movie too misogynistic. There’s no violence towards women on screen for example, except a compelling sequence in which Belmondo, returning home with the realisation that he has been duped, forcibly empties Deneuve’s trunk and casts several items of underwear onto the fire. The camera remains fixed on the items as they singe, blacken, smoke and, ultimately, catch fire to a frankly disturbing, metaphorical degree.

Ultimately, Mississippi Mermaid is a stylish and quietly tongue-in-cheek appreciative handling of Hitchcockian and film noir tropes that also seeks to explore the notion of a toxic relationship and the pains of love and I’m pleased to see that Radiance are giving film lovers the chance to reappraise it. The extras on this release include two archival interviews from 1969, the first with Truffaut, looking back at his career up until this point, and the second featuring Jean Renoir’s appreciation of his fellow filmmaker. There’s also a new and specially recorded interview with French cinema expert Ginette Vincendeau, an audio commentary from critic Glenn Kenny and the obligatory trailer.

Mark’s Archive – Mississippi Mermaid (1969)