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Credits
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Summary
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...?
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 very probably La
Sirène du Mississippi. With its huge budget (8 million francs), exotic
location (the island of Réunion) and big name billing (and you couldn't get much
bigger than Belmondo and Deneuve), this was Truffaut's most conscious attempt to make
a blockbuster thriller on an almost American scale, with an obviously American theme.
Truffaut's intention, presumably, was to make a homage to Alfred Hitchock, the director
with whom he had perhaps the greatest affinity. References to the great Hitch abound
in this film, with Truffaut borrowing freely from such works as Vertigo and North
by Northwest, particularly in the way he portrays deception and mounting paranoia.
Yet La Sirène du Mississippi is much more than a pastiche of Hitchcock thrillers. The story (derived from a novel by the American writer Cornell Woolrich, alias William Irish) is fundamentally a tale of tortured love which is very typical of Truffaut's cinema. The idea of a one-sided, destructive romantic love recurs in the director's films. It was also a feature of his own life, which was scarred by a number of ill-fated love affairs, most notably - and ironically - with Catherine Deneuve. Although it has a playful side, with some typically Truffaut-esque tongue-in-cheek comedy, it is also surprisingly disturbing in places, showing a darker streak which is much more in evidence in the director's later films (from the late 1970s). Casting such high-profile stars as Belmono and Deneuve was possibly Truffaut's greatest ever gamble but both actors serve the film well. Belmondo, a hugely popular film actor better known for his crowd-pulling action films, gives a convincing performance, using his solitary persona to portray a hard man with a vulnerable interior. He brings passion and intelligence to his role which makes his character's infatuation for the self-centred ice-cold character played by Deneuve appear absurd and tragic at the same time. The dialogue between the two characters (which at times degenerates into comic repartee) is exquisitely written, revealing in Truffaut a keen observer of human interaction. Although the film stands up well against Truffaut's better known films, 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 in an uncharacteristically passive role and a certain ambivalence amongst some film critics towards that actor at the time. By dedicating the film to Jean Renoir, François Truffaut acknowledged his debt to a film director he greatly admired who became a personal friend. The film begins with a brief excerpt from Renoir's historical epic, La Marseillaise, and a poster of his most recent film Le Caporal épinglé is visible in one scene. © James Travers 2003 Buy films by François Truffaut More about the French New Wave Write a review for this film... |
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