La Sirène du Mississippi (1969)
Directed by François Truffaut

Film Review

The film in which French New Wave director François Truffaut shows most clearly his love of American pulp fiction and the suspense-thriller genre is most probably La Sirène du Mississippi.  With its huge budget (eight million francs), exotic locations (the island of Réunion and the south of France) and big name billing (you couldn't get much bigger than Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve at the time), this was Truffaut's most conscious attempt to make a Hollywood-style romantic thriller.  Truffaut was particularly inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, the distinguished British director whom he had famously interviewed for a book which he published a few years previously.  References to Hitchcock's great American films abound in this film, with Truffaut borrowing freely from such works as Vertigo and North by Northwest, particularly in the way he portrays deception, conflict and mounting paranoia.

Yet La Sirène du Mississippi is much more than a pastiche of Hitchcock thrillers.  Based on the novel Waltz into Darkness by the American writer Cornell Woolrich, alias William Irish, whose The Bride Wore Black was previously adapted by Truffaut as La Mariée était en Noir (1967), the film offers a dark and brutal portrayal of obsessive love, what the French call amour passionnel.  The theme of an all-consuming amorous passion which ultimately destroys its victims is one that frequently recurs in Truffaut's cinema, and is most vividly rendered in some of his best films, notably Jules et Jim (1962), La Peau douce (1964) and La Femme d'à côté (1981).  Truffaut was himself subject to many amours passionnels in his own life, including one with Catherine Deneuve, with whom he had a short but intense love affair during and after the making of this film.

Although Belmondo and Deneuve were both cast primarily for commercial reasons (the choice of Deneuve was made by Truffaut's producers, Robert and Raymond Hakim), both actors serve the film remarkably well.  In films such as Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour (1967), Deneuve had exhibited a particular aptitude for playing complex characters whose troubled interior world is belied by an unnaturally calm surface exterior.  What makes La Sirène du Mississippi so compelling and disturbing is the unwavering ambiguity of Deneuve's character - she remains an enigma throughout the film, and we can never be sure whether she is sincere in her protestations of love or merely a very good actress.  This is a film that plays to Deneuve's strengths and she rewards it by giving one of her most beguiling and chilling performances.

The choice of Belmondo for the male lead is far less obvious and was made by Truffaut himself, one of his most inspired casting decisions.  By the late 1960s, Jean-Paul Belmondo had become the biggest box office draw in French cinema, renowned for playing popular action heroes in such films as
Cartouche (1962), L'Homme de Rio (1964) and Week-end à Zuydcoote (1964).  He was also keenly sought after by auteur filmmakers, notably Jean-Pierre Melville and Jean-Luc Godard, who made better use of his acting talent in films like Le Doulos (1962) and Pierrot le fou (1965).  Although he is best known for his action roles, Belmondo is just as well-suited for playing vulnerable loners, the role he is given in La Sirène du Mississippi.  Belmondo's character in this film is almost the inverse of Deneuve's.  Whereas Marion is elusive, hard to pin down and seemingly lacking in genuine human feeling, Mahé is an open book, a flawed but otherwise decent man who is lured to his doom by easily discernible passions.  Belmondo's mix of old-fashioned machismo and child-like fragility makes him the prefect complement to Deneuve's assured but inscrutable femme fatale.

Today, La Sirène du Mississippi stands up well against Truffaut's better known films, but it was very poorly received when it was first released.  The critics generally hated it and the French cinema-going public gave it a resounding thumbs down.   The film's disappointing performance at the box office probably had less to do with its inherent quality and much more to do with Jean-Paul Belmondo being cast against type in a passive role and a certain ambivalence amongst some film critics towards that actor at the time.  This negative appraisal of the film has stayed with it for some time, assisted by some injudicious cuts made for the American release (which served merely to weaken the film's narrative cohesion).  Of all of Truffaut's film, this is the one which is least regarded and most deserving of a fresh reappraisal.

Truffaut was himself quite pleased with this film and dedicated it to Jean Renoir, the film director whom he greatly admired and who became a close personal friend.  The film begins with a brief excerpt from Renoir's historical epic, La Marseillaise (1938), and a poster of his most recent film Le Caporal épinglé is clearly visible in one scene.   Truffaut bore the critical and commercial failure of La Sirène du Mississippi with uncharacteristic insouciance.  He was in love and happily pursuing a liaison with his leading lady, someone whom the press described as the most beautiful woman in the world.  Like the ill-fated hero of his film, he too had fallen under the siren's spell.

Film Synopsis

Louis Mahé, the wealthy owner of a tobacco plantation on the island of Réunion, decides to get married - to Julie Roussel, a woman he found through the personal ads pages of his newspaper.  Shortly after the marriage, Julie disappears with most of Louis' personal fortune and it becomes apparent that she is an impostor.  Intent on revenge, Louis engages a private detective to track down his wife, whose real name is Marion.  Within a few weeks of his return to France, Louis meets up with Marion in Nice but, realising that he still loves her, manages to forgive her.  Aware that the police suspect his wife of killing the real Julie Roussel, Louis is prepared to do anything to protect her.  But does Marion have any love for him - or is she still only interested in his money...?