Barnes & Noble

The wickedly pretty Mississippi Mermaid is one of François Truffaut's more overlooked films. The twisting plot involves Louis Mahé (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a tobacco plantation owner on a far-off tropical isle who places an ad in Paris for a mail-order bride. She arrives in the Yves St. Laurent resplendence of Julie Roussel (Catherine Deneuve). After exchanging vows, evidence piles up that suggests Julie is not really Julie. By the time the proof comes, she's already siphoned money from the couple's joint bank account. He puts a detective on the trail, and while faking a cure in an asylum, sees TV footage of her in a new, Playboyesque club and pursues her with a homicidal vengeance. But the sight of her, the revelation of her real name (Marion, also a '60s Hitchcock staple), and her recounting of her shady, juvenile delinquent past makes him love her all the more. The two continue to bicker, fight, make up, and hide out from the cops, as they discover that this love, a "joy and misery," is the real thing. At first glance, Mississippi Mermaid seems very indebted to Marnie, Alfred Hitchcock's own tale of a misidentified blonde tormenting an obsessed guy until both experience -- in the words of Hitchcock -- a "degradation of love." The new Mississippi Mermaid DVD goes well beyond this by adding 13 minutes to a previous home video cut. This restoration can only be called a revelation. The two brand-new scenes soften the characters -- one is a monologue from Louis to "Julie" about her beauty that would seem ridiculous in less caring hands than Truffaut's. The other "new" scene involves a suave gag where Marion phonographically etches an earnest confession of desire to Louis only to have it run over by a passing truck. Both additions are invaluable as they humanize Deneuve's character -- an archetype whose malice fit Hitchcock's fashionable icy blonde persona all too well. Mississippi Mermaid supplies a lovely, rich example of how François Truffaut can meld both sides of a filmmaker's brain: in this case, a cool, studied suspense technique with his own classically romantic sincerity. Eddy Crouse

All Movie Guide

A rare mid-career flop for director François Truffaut when it was released, Mississippi Mermaid has become a cult favorite, thanks in part to the availability of the original French version, which added 13 minutes to the U.S. release running time. Adapted from a story by William Irish, it's a noirish tale of a man who orders a mail-order bride but receives instead a con woman. Louis Mahe (Jean-Paul Belmondo) owns a tobacco factory on the remote Indian Ocean island of Reunion. His bride, Julie Roussel (Catherine Deneuve), looks nothing like the photo she sent him, but she explains that she had forwarded a picture of a friend instead. After Louis allows Julie access to both his personal and company bank accounts, she disappears with most of his fortune. Heartbroken and bitter, he takes a holiday in the south of France and improbably spots "Julie" on a TV news story. When he tracks her down, she reveals her real name, Marion, and how she and her con-man boyfriend, Richard, had intercepted the real Julie on the boat Mississippi that was headed for Reunion. Richard threw Julie off the ship and Marion assumed her identity, but once the two thieves returned to France, Richard made off with the money. Marion professes that she fell in love with Louis, and he believes her. They try to make a life together in France, but a private detective whom Louis and Julie's sister, Berthe, had hired to find Marion, tracks them down to a house they have rented in Aix en Provence, forcing them to go on the run. Tom Wiener

Product Details

• UPC: 883904129004
• Source: MGM (VIDEO & DVD)
• Time: 2:03:00
• Sales Rank: 11,335