La sirène du Mississippi

François Truffaut (1969)

The opening titles are promising:  a montage of personal ads, a growing, somewhat sinister babble of voices reading them.   Then there’s a map of the world and the camera zooms in on Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean.  This is a swift, engaging prelude to the meeting of Louis Mahé (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a tobacco plantation owner on Réunion, and his pen-pal bride.  Louis is surprised that the Julie Roussel who steps off the boat looks nothing like her photograph but she’s Catherine Deneuve so they get married anyway.  In these early scenes the film draws you in.  There are happenings that, in the real world, might be expected to halt progress but they’re overpowered by the movement of the film:  what propels the story is the momentum Truffaut develops by sharp editing of a series of short scenes.   Belmondo’s persona chimes with this, too. Louis seems cheerfully undaunted by setbacks and confusions and gets on with things.  After a little while, I fell asleep against my will; later, I dropped off without trying to fight it.   Once I was properly awake again, I got so irritated I couldn’t think straight.  I may have missed something crucial while unconscious but I’m starting to wonder if I really like Truffaut.  The negatives (Vivement, Dimanche!, now this) have drawn level with the positives (Les quatre cents coups,  Jules et Jim).  Even though I could see that Tirez le Pianiste was good, I didn’t enjoy it.

La sirène du Mississippi rapidly disappears up itself.  Besotted with Julie, Louis gives her access to his bank account.  She cleans him out and hotfoots it back to Europe.  He follows, tracks her down, and realises he’s still in her spell.  At one point Louis says the people who put personal ads in papers are ‘idealists’ – they’re looking to change their lives in five lines.  He talks too about the idealism that the real Julie communicated in her letters to him – and how the impostor has replaced this with the ‘ephemeral’.  (It turns out that Julie aka Marion Vergano murdered the bride-to-be.) But as none of this appears to cause Louis a moment’s pause for thought, the words don’t connect with anything else – they’re just something fancy to say.   It’s the same when he tells Julie/Marion that she’s ‘adorable’ and defines ‘adorable’:  it shows that he knows what the word means.  Still, if it weren’t for Belmondo, La sirène du Mississippi would be quite intolerable.  He’s a great presence – the physical charm and self-confidence that seems to be centred on his broad, pugnacious nose, a phlegmatic temperament inflected by sensitivity – and a wonderful actor.  What he does here isn’t much compared with A bout de souffle or Moderato cantabile or Pierrot le fou yet there are still marvellous things.  When Louis gets dispirited, Belmondo slumps utterly yet not obviously.  The loss of morale permeates his body but you don’t see how he achieves this effect.

Catherine Deneuve is effective for as long as Julie is presented as heartless.  The BFI programme note was an interview with Truffaut which suggested that we’re meant to believe, by the end, that Louis and Julie are so deeply in love they’re inseparable, even though she’s tried to poison him.   Her remorse for this is, like everything else Deneuve does, exquisitely insincere.   If Truffaut really did mean to show her as transformed by love, he failed and I don’t know why he would anyway.  The film is dedicated to Jean Renoir but Deneuve’s ice-blonde inscrutability is one of the elements that connects it more to Hitchcock; so is the glamorous couple’s adventurous odyssey; and perhaps the music too, though Antoine Duhamel’s score is sub-sub-Bernard Herrmann.  As the private detective Camolli, whom Louis hires to find Julie and who then finds Louis, Michel Bouquet’s smug tenacity is extremely annoying.  When Louis shoots him, it’s a relief to see the smile wiped off Camolli’s face, although his death stagger and fall downstairs are startling.  For all his cinematic knowledge and technique, Truffaut’s view of woman as seductress seems pretty tedious here.  He did the screenplay, which was based on a 1947 American novel Waltz into Darkness by William Irish.  The story was remade by Michael Cristofer in 2001 as Original Sin, with Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie.

10 February 2011