MM is a cool movie
from nouvelle vogue French director Francois Truffaut. Truffaut
was a Hitchcock fan, and once even wrote a coffee table book about the
master. In a sense, this film is his homage to the master in that it
uses a typical Hitchcock storyline, and was adapted from a Cornell
Woolrich novel, following the trail blazed by Hitch with Woolrich's
Rear Window. On the other hand, Mississippi Mermaid is actually
dedicated not to Hitchcock, but to the French director Jean Renoir,
indicating that it's really more about obsessive love than guilt.
It begins with a
factory and plantation owner (Jean-Paul Belmondo) on the island of
Reunion waiting at the dock for Carole, his classified-ad bride, who
is to arrive from France on the ship Mississippi. He knows
her appearance from a photograph, but doesn't see her at the pier.
Disappointed, he walks back to his car where a stunning woman
(Catherine DeNeuve) is waiting, claiming to be Carole. Her appearance
does not match the photograph, she tells him, because she had actually
sent him a picture of her friend, a less attractive woman, so that he
wouldn't decide to marry her for her looks alone. He then admits he
also lied by telling her that he was a foreman, so that she wouldn't
marry him for his wealth alone.
So they go ahead with
the wedding, and everything is blissful for a while. Their marriage
goes great, and they put all their liquid assets in joint bank
accounts. But then we see her sneak off one day to meet with someone
on the island. Who could this be? We don't know. Then something
strange happens. Belmondo gets a letter from Carole's sister accusing
him of doing something bad to Carole, because she hasn't written or
called home in weeks. Belmondo innocently calls home and tells his
wife to call her sister, but when he gets home from work that day, an
alerted Deneuve has cleaned out their bank accounts and fled the
island. Belmondo and the sister figure out that Deneuve was a con
artist who killed the real Carole and impersonated her, obviously with
the help of an accomplice. The deceived husband and the aggrieved
sister jointly hire an expensive detective to track down Deneuve.
The detective has
little success at first, but luck intervenes. Belmondo is in Nice
recuperating from an illness when he sees a TV ad for a new nightclub,
and spies Deneuve dancing at the club as a "dime a dance" girl. He
soon confronts her, and she tells the real story of how she ended up
with nothing out of the millions of francs she embezzled. Belmondo
believes her because she is living in squalor and working hard for
poverty wages. He falls in love with her again. Logic tells him he
should probably kill her or turn her in, but he sees that she, too, is
a victim.
And she is Catherine
Deneuve!
There is this little
problem, however, in that she's technically a murderess. She and her
accomplice tossed the real Carole overboard. And there is also the
matter of the detective, who finally catches up with Deneuve, and will
not be bribed off the case by Belmondo, because he is also obligated
to Carole's sister. So Belmondo kills him and buries him, then goes
back to Reunion to liquidate the remaining value of his estate and his
business, finally returning to Deneuve to begin life on the run.
This life is not so
bad at first, since they have a ton of cash, and nobody knows that the
detective is dead, but luck intervenes again. A fluke flood uncovers
the detective's buried body, and police begin searching for the
fugitive couple in earnest. The police arrive in their room one day
while they are out to eat. They realize that they can't go back to the
room after dinner, which means they have to leave behind all the cash.
In order to remain together, they must thereafter live not only on the
run, but penniless as well.
How does it get
resolved? You'll have to see the movie to find out, but I think it's
fair to say that the ending is not what you expect, and you will
probably find it refreshing.
I should now be
telling you that you have to own this DVD. The plot is fundamentally
an interesting story, written and directed by Truffaut. It stars
Deneuve and Belmondo. The breathtakingly beautiful Deneuve takes off
her shirt twice. The backdrop includes spectacular locations on the
tropical island and in the south of France. And the original 2.35
aspect ratio is now seen for the first time outside of a theater.
Don't get carried away with
enthusiasm. The film also
has some major
negatives:
-
If you have been
paying attention to the plot summary, you know that this script has
a gigantic plot loophole. We're not talking some minor quibbling
point here, but simply a big ol' flub, so big that the entire film
makes no sense! You'll recall that Deneuve and her co-conspirator
killed the real Carole on the ship, whereupon Deneuve took her
place. Unfortunately, this simply could not have happened. They
would not have done that because at that time Carole did not know
that she would end up married to a rich man. She thought she was
going to the island to marry a poor and humble foreman for true
love! That means that Deneuve took her place in the hope of conning
a poor man. Perhaps the co-conspirators are not the world's smartest
criminals, but every criminal realizes that swindling a poor person
is not an especially lucrative activity. I haven't read the source
novel (Cornell Woolrich's "Waltz into Darkness"), but based on
Woolrich's excellent reputation, I don't think such a mammoth error
could have been present in the book.
-
Many people have
argued that it was not credible for Belmondo to have forgiven
Deneuve after she embezzled the money. I actually had no problem
with that point, because her explanation was obviously true (she
obviously had no money), and because this kind of obsession for a
woman is not unknown. I did find the plot's
coincidences
lacking in credibility: first of all there was the fact that in all
of Europe she just happened to end up working in the same city as
his sanitorium, and then there was the handy flood.
-
Truffaut did one thing
very irritating in his direction. He obviously figured out an
excellent method to film the action in a moving convertible. The
camera is placed just behind the car, so it can pick up their
conversations as well as show the countryside that they traverse.
This technique was very effective the first two times he used it in
the film, once while driving through city streets, and once through
a row of palm trees. Unfortunately, Truffaut just kept doing the
same thing over and over again, sometimes for very long stretches.
I'll bet 20-30 minutes of this film consists of conversations in
moving automobiles.
-
One other thing I
found tedious was a very long scene in which Deneuve keeps Belmondo
from killing her when they first reunite. She tells her life story
up until their meeting at the docks, and essentially the entire
scene is done with a "head shot." That was remarkably unimaginative,
and the boring, non-visual scene seems to go on forever. If I have
to look at a talking head for ten minutes, Deneuve beats the hell
out of Jack Black or Clint Howard, but that was a long stretch with
no action.
-
The film wasn't well
received in the USA in the 70's, but that version had fallen prey to
13 minutes of censorship which made the complex plot and motivations
incomprehensible. The DVD (original) version is still complicated,
but everything makes more sense now, even if there are a few too
many coincidences to be believed.
Those negatives
detract from the film's appeal, but they don't keep me from
recommending it. No film is perfect, possibly excepting "Shakes the
Clown". On balance, Mississippi Mermaid is a worthwhile film, but
there is a deal-breaker which forces me to warn you away from this
specific DVD. The quality is poor. There are no extras except a
trailer. That fact alone would be a major disappointment for a work of
one of the masters, but that's not the deal-breaker, which is that the
film itself looks bad on this transfer. The source media must have
been grainy, faded, and damaged. Apparently, no restoration work was
performed to produce the DVD version. That means there is still no
decent copy of this Truffaut film! I hope someone finds a pristine
print or interneg or something, and creates a properly mastered DVD.
