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Mississippi Mermaid
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“The film isn’t fantastic, but it isn’t a failure”. That was writer-director François Truffaut’s judgment on Mississippi Mermaid at the time of its making, as conveyed in a letter to Cahiers du cinéma editor Jean Narboni. Several waves of Truffaut connoisseurs – including biographers Antoine de Baecque & Serge Toubiana, and researcher Carole Le Berre – have since tried valiantly to raise that estimation. Are they correct to see this star-studded, relatively luxuriant production as a central, and very personal (whatever that means!), part of Truffaut’s career, and his artistic expression? Their arguments are perfectly logical and persuasive, but the film, re-seen today, refuses to entirely gel for me. Approached as an adaptation of Waltz into Darkness (1947) by Cornell Woolrich (aka William Irish) – which I happened to read and enjoy shortly before this re-viewing – the project seems wonky from the outset. The casting of the handsome and vital Jean-Paul Belmondo as the novel’s ageing, insecure bachelor is, at best, counter-intuitive. What’s more, Truffaut dispenses (as is his wont) with any expository psychology; we are simply plunged, after the usual helter-skelter of credits, dedications and flash-prologues, into the first face-to-face meeting of this man, Louis, with his suspiciously gorgeous mail correspondent, Julie, played by Catherine Deneuve. From that point onward, Truffaut downplays most of the mystery-thriller mechanics inherent in the material – he races through the plot-points even more quickly than usual, especially in a memorably condensed passage where, over a shot of Louis driving, we hear not only an aural flashback of what we’ve already seen, but also a flashforward to the subsequent scene we won’t see! There is only the pesky intrusion, now and again, of the Reality Principle represented by a dogged, equally obsessed private detective (Michel Bouquet). But, like all such embodiments in the film, once out of the picture, even this chap’s corpse scarcely registers as a concrete pendulum to a love story that seeks to exist beyond place and time … All romantic idylls of this amour fou type tend to be doomed and fleeting in Truffaut. But Mississippi Mermaid comes closest, in its final snowy moments, to freeing its love-unto-death essence into an ethereal, phantasmic immortality. Throughout, Truffaut is fixed on one thing alone: the shifting emotional and sexual dynamics of his strange, central couple. He conceptualised the relationship, in quasi-screwball fashion, as the clash of a tough, worldly punk (Deneuve) and a shy, naive virgin (Belmondo). The noir set-up of Julie as a deceptive, alluring femme fatale or siren (as per the French title) – pastiched, more faithfully to the spirit of Woolrich, in the crazy USA adaptation Original Sin (2001) – never really hooks onto Truffaut’s dramaturgy, although he often flirted in his career with depicting this type of iconic figure. Ultimately, the male gives into his masochistic fate as passive victim as willingly, even merrily, as the female drives the action-scenario (of theft, abandonment, poisoning … ). Disconcertingly, even a significant Third Party in the book – Julie’s former lover/pimp – is left so far in the off-screen shadows as to be almost completely negligible. Truffaut went to the extent of eliminating during the edit (Cassavetes-style!) the cause-effect link between that guy’s death and Julie’s temporary erotic cooling-off with Louis. The fewer exterior causes or prompts, the better for Truffaut … very different, in this regard, to an admirer-emulator like Bertrand Tavernier. Or Arnaud Desplechin who, with only slight exaggeration, admiringly describes the “narrative purity” of Mississippi Mermaid, as “rare, even unique” in its drive to “tell a love story without need of a third person. Here, there’s no confidant, no rival, no deceit” – it is solely “the adventure of an emotion” (Cahiers du cinema, Truffaut hors-série special, April 2023, p. 107). The net result of all this juggling of elements and levels is intriguing, uneven, sometimes intense. Studies of Truffaut over the past two decades have emphasised the encrypted autobiographical element of Truffaut’s connection to Deneuve (the sister of a previous love, Françoise Dorléac – a Vertigo-type ghostly echo inscribed literally into the mise en scène), and the accompanying erotic charge this gave to the film’s love scenes. Spookily, this somewhat secretive auteur also uncannily predicted, in Mississippi Mermaid, the end of the affair, and the precise treatment he would require to recover from that blow: a “sleeping cure”. (Does this weirdly Romantic psychiatric practice – “a regimen of tranquilisers and bed rest”, seemingly once very popular in France – still exist in the 21st century?) Most curious of all is Truffaut’s diligent inclusion, in the first part of the story, of a fascinating social setting – a French colonial plantation of the late ‘60s on the island of Réunion (replacing Woolrich’s New Orleans) – which remains entirely unintegrated into the central theme. Still, it’s something to behold all these years later: the crowd attending the wedding of Louis and Julie is virtually all-Black! Unsurprisingly, this discrepancy (the fiction is “too beautiful for that reality”) marks precisely one of the things that Jean-Pierre “Mr Suture” Oudart found (I think) objectionable about the film on its release (Cahiers, no. 216, October 1969), in the course of a hyper-convoluted review (mentioning scarcely a single detail of the film, its stars, or even the basic plot premise!) that catalysed the split of the magazine from its commercial publisher of the time … Final observation: In Kino Lorber’s 2023 Blu-ray edition of Mississippi Mermaid, the only bonus of note is ported from the 2015 Twilight Time version – an audio commentary by Nick Redman (who died in 2019) and Julie Kirgo. They provide an amiable, insightful chat about the characters and situations, with (in an amusing contretemps) Kirgo finding “perverse” a particular sexual element that Redman takes in his stride, suggesting that it’s probably what Truffaut and Deneuve did in bed together! However, the Redman-Kirgo pair betray little knowledge of the vast mountain of scholarship on Truffaut. For that angle on Mississippi Mermaid, I highly recommend the in-depth work of Anne Gillain. MORE Truffaut: Two English Girls, The Soft Skin, Love on the Run, Day for Night © Adrian Martin 6 & 7 March 2023 |
