Mississippi Mermaid

“Mississippi Mermaid has the form of a preposterous romantic melodrama, but it is so full of lovely, complex things - of unannounced emotions, of ideas, of the memories of other movies (Truffaut’s, as well as of those of two of his father-figures, Renoir and Hitchcock) - that it defies easy definition and blithely triumphs over what initially appears to be structural schizophrenia. It is the creation of a superior moviemaker who works eccentrically in the classical tradition””

“Francois Truffaut stepped out of his autobiographical comfort zone for this 1969 film, a romantic thriller set on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean and based on the novel ‘Waltz into Darkness’ by Cornell Woolrich (writing under his William Irish pseudonym). Jean-Paul Belmondo is a tobacco planter who writes away for a mail-order bride; when Catherine Deneuve shows up at his doorstep, things seem a bit too good to be true, and so they are. (Mississippi Mermaid) returns, ripe for re-evaluation.”

“This bewitching, circuitous love story starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo at their most dazzling, complete with 13 especially character-revealing moments that were excised from the American version of the film. It was madness for them to have been removed. This visually elegant yet frankly emotional romance is about why the best reply to “I love you” might finally be “I believe you”, as it is here.”

“And if you have never seen it, you can’t afford to pass up La Sirene du Mississippi (Mississippi Mermaid). This is Truffaut’s go-for-broke romantic melodrama in which Belmondo gives up everything for the love of his mail-order bride, a beautiful, two-timing, possibly murderous jade (Deneuve). Even the opening title credits are haunting”

“At its best Truffaut’s work retains a piercing candor, a directness and material immediacy that only the cinema, in the hands of its masters, can communicate. Time hasn’t dulled Truffaut’s achievement, but it has highlighted it differently. He was a thornier, more complex filmmaker than we thought, and perhaps a greater one.”