It’s an enduring tragedy when great films are spurned by both critics and viewers at the time of their release. The judgment of history is often more accurate. François Truffaut made an unabashedly romantic and continent-hopping Hitchcockian thriller, “Mississippi Mermaid,” in 1969, starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo. The film, adapted from a novel by Cornell Woolrich, is one of Truffaut’s most personal, passionate, and accomplished films, even something of a manifesto of his vision of life, love, and the cinema. (It’s streaming on Amazon Prime.) If anyone was equipped to make a Hitchcockian film, it was Truffaut—after all, he had spent years crafting his book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, which came out in 1966 and became a classic of film literature. It was precisely Truffaut’s strategy to wrap his deepest concerns in a superficially conventional “genre” package. But critics didn’t get it. For more popularly oriented reviewers at the time, it was insufficiently glamorous and glitzy; for more artistic-minded ones, it seemed commercial and derivative. It was a commercial failure, too.
The action starts on Réunion, the French island just east of Madagascar, where Louis Mahé (Belmondo), the reserved and inhibited young heir who owns and runs his family’s cigarette factory, awaits his fiancée, whom he met through a personal ad. Named Julie Roussel (Deneuve), she arrives by boat, and doesn’t seem to be quite all that her letters portended. But, for Louis, she’s also more: far from merely offering a meeting of the minds, she also ignites his long-stifled sexual desire. He dismisses any suspicions arising from the gaps in her story. He renders himself vulnerable to her wiles, and she takes full advantage of his vulnerability, fleecing him and fleeing. Louis hires a detective to find her and flies to the south of metropolitan France to recover his tranquillity—until Julie turns up again.
Like Hitchcock’s films, “Mississippi Mermaid” is a meticulous contemplation of locations: the heat and the light of Réunion are virtually characters (and Truffaut revels in the incongruity, for a native Parisian such as himself, of celebrating Christmas in a tropical climate). He weaves the island’s colonial history into the action and takes dramatic note of the island’s ethnic diversity, giving its characters of color prominence and voice while also indicating—in a jolting image of workers in a tobacco field—his own sense of shock at its stratification. Louis is a cloistered boss, siloed in his upbringing of privilege and tradition, blind both to others and to himself. One of the hints of his connection to Truffaut (who, though not at all privileged in his youth, had become a prosperous young boss himself) is the place of images in the story: Louis celebrates his romantic passion by publishing a picture of Julie on his packages of cigarettes, which pass through the factory’s machines like a strip of film through a projector. (Also, Louis’s right-hand man is played by Marcel Berbert, Truffaut’s real-life production manager.) No less than Hitchcock, Truffaut balances the mystery and tension—and the artifice—of his drama with piercing symbolic touches, and those symbols run throughout the movie, both in winks and allusions, in the intense weight placed on tiny physical objects and fine turns of dialogue (for instance, the uses of the formal “vous” and the familiar “tu”), in the references to other movies, and in constant silent undercurrents that drive the action.
Truffaut displays a virtuosity of choreographed long takes, which culminate in a grand sequence, at the center of the film—one that’s as exquisite as it is suspenseful—in which the estranged couple is reunited. Yet the sharply defined narrative framework, the aesthetic elaboration of the carefully calibrated storytelling, is no mere commercial concession or professional deception. Rather, it serves the practical purpose of providing a link to something that matters just as much to Truffaut: backstory. Where Louis’s lineage, traceable through centuries, burdens him with formalities and social constraints, Julie’s story dovetails with Truffaut’s career-long obsession (starting with “The 400 Blows”) with the neglected, abused wild child, whose life of deceit is part of a desperate struggle for a tiny toehold on stability. The inventive elegance of Truffaut’s style trembles with the labyrinthine wiles behind the appearances, seethes with the passion beneath the elegant surfaces. Deneuve, with a taut grace that never betrays the tension of maintaining it, embodies Julie’s high-gloss manners and high personal style in touches reminiscent of Tippi Hedren’s role in Hitchcock’s “Marnie,” yet another story of a female predator who was an abused child. (Truffaut would revisit the theme of an abused girl’s eventual revenge in one of his rarest and wildest films, “A Gorgeous Girl Like Me,” from 1972—as a loopy comedy, with references to “Vertigo.”)
Truffaut’s critical vision of a cruel society that neglects and abuses children under the guise of norms of discipline, education, and order is nonetheless not merely a cause for practical change: in his view, it’s haunted by irrational drives that cannot be controlled or reformed. Truffaut told the story of Louis and Julie as an express response to the film of a friend with whom he’d soon have a break: Jean-Luc Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou,” in which Belmondo played a staid businessman who runs off with a young woman (Anna Karina) on a romantic idyll that turns violent. The allusions are clear throughout, in visual quotations and textual references (including a visit to a movie theatre to see “Johnny Guitar”). Truffaut’s film turns to violence, too; it pushes in the direction of a Liebestod, as does Godard’s film. But Truffaut relies on a more conventional psychological framework to fill in his characters’ personal and social dimensions—and in order to develop an idea of love that’s simultaneously perverse and redemptive. The twisty but tightly knit plot of “Mississippi Mermaid” ultimately suggests irreconcilable conflicts between the individual and society. (It does so, ultimately, with a surprising reference to “Grand Illusion,” by Jean Renoir, to whom the film is dedicated.) The romantic ideal that Truffaut dramatizes here is wildly unjust; his notion of personal healing and the redemption of shattered lives has terrifying implications. Above all, Truffaut suggests the ideas beneath Hitchcock’s erotic tensions and dramatic reversals: they bring to light a tragic sense of life and its unbearable contradictions, bearably.
