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.
© James Travers 2003
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Next François Truffaut film:
Domicile conjugal (1970)