Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #272711 in DVD
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: French
• Running time: 123 minutes

Amazon.com
Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as the owner of a cigarette factory on an African island, and a single man who advertises for a wife and, voilà, gets Catherine Deneuve. Problem is, however, she isn't quite what she seems in this 1969 drama by François Truffaut, taken from a Cornell Woolrich novel called Waltz into Darkness. Suspicions lead to deception and deception to murder, and along the way Belmondo's character, despite everything, continues to fall in love with his enigmatic prize, which is really the point of the film: the protagonist, almost as if he were willing himself into a noir myth, seems determined to fall under the spell of a romantic delusion. A fine effort by Truffaut that is the best of his mid-period pulpy, suspense films (along with The Bride Wore Black and Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me). --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews

La Belle de Soir
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.

A noire thriller from Truffaut
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.

Darkest Deneuve
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.