Continuing a trawl for any films starring Jean Paul Belmondo produced this little known late-career entry from Francois Truffaut, "Mississippi Mermaid", (1969) pairing him with Catherine Deneuve. I discovered the film via streaming service ok.ru only last week which seems to host mostly unauthorised uploads and I had never heard of the film prior to this.
Skimming through the plot, which concerns Belmondo as a wealthy but still single heir to a tobacco factory on the island of Le Réunion, a French colony in the Indian Ocean, and his search for a wife via matrimonial adverts in French newspapers, develops into what is essentially a film noir genre film with the classic elements of a femme fatale, played by Deneuve, who embroils Belmondo's "Louis Mahé" in a plot to steal his wealth whilst posing as the woman he thought was answering his matrimonial adverts.
Belmondo had, by this film, proved his range, from serious, uncharacteristic roles such as in "Leon Morin, Priest" and broad comedies such as "A Monkey in Winter" and of course Godard's "Pierrot Le Fou", but the revelation here is Deneuve who demonstrates a range beyond the peaches and cream image from films such as Jacques Demy's "Les Demoiselles De Rochefort" in her portrayal of the treacherous "Julie Roussel" whom "Louis Mahé" never quite trusts as they go on the run after he falls hopelessly in love with her - I mean who wouldn't ?
This dynamic between the two leads is the core of the film and is one that can be found in many earlier American film noirs that the French New Wave writer/directors were very influenced by, though by the late 1960's there is no any pretence at imitating the stylised chiaroscuro black and white drama of those Hollywood pot-boiler films and in this film in particular it's easy to mistake it for a conventional romance but with a darker edge, partly due to the location filming - most Hollywood film noirs were essentially studio bound - and the colour film stocks/aspect ratio used.
A characteristic of some of the 1950'/60's French New Wave directors, of which Truffaut was a leading light, is the arc of their careers after early success with a series of classic films that defined the direction of the New Wave, followed by the downward part of a bell curve - you can see this pattern in the later films of Jacques Demy, for example. However, what didn't appear to wane were their obsessions with certain styles and subjects common to American cinema, being film noir in Truffaut's case and American musicals in Demy's case - the pursuing of such populist forms didn't necessarily affect their New Wave contemporaries who ploughed their own very individualistic furrows. That said, "Mississippi Mermaid" is Truffaut at the top of his game and he focusses entirely on doing justice to the plot without ever leaning into anything particularly "Truffaut-esque" that would run the risk of obscuring the absorbing plot.
Only yesterday I discovered that the film is now available on Amazon Prime after a previous fruitless search for it just after discovering it on ok.ru !
04/12/24
"Mississippi Mermaid", Dir: Francois Truffaut, 1969
Amazon Prime
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