‘Mississippi Mermaid’ or — Love Hurts?

Colin Edwards
3 min readDec 18, 2024

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The film raises a question — is she destroying him or is he softening her heart? But here’s another question that also supplies an answer — does it really matter?

Louis (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is the wealthy owner of a tobacco plantation on the remote island of Reunion located in the Indian Ocean. Through the classified ads of a French newspaper he’s struck up a courtship correspondence with a woman called Julie so she travels to Reunion so they can be married. Suspicions are raised when, on her arrival, Julie looks nothing like her photograph although these suspicions are immediately dismissed because this woman, whoever she may be, looks exactly like Catherine Deneuve. Louis isn’t complaining.

Further niggling doubts pop-up when, after the wedding, Julie empties Louis’ bank account and quickly buggers off. Hmm, I’m starting to think this “Julie” woman might be no good.

When Louis finally tracks Julie down in the south of France she appeals to him with a sob-story, her tale of woe, and he falls in love with her all over again. A murder is committed, more money extracted and we realise Julie is leading Louis to total annihilation.

Or is she?

Viewed as a thriller ‘Mississippi Mermaid’ (1969) is a bleak, somewhat misogynistic (women are evil and will ruin you!), highly unbelievable tale of toxic love, greed and emotional abuse, and director Francois Truffaut initially plays up to that angle in the film’s first act with touches of Hitchcock, Lang and Feuillade suggesting that’s what we’re in for. Viewed as a comedy, however, and ‘Mississippi Mermaid’ is about as sweet, touching and tender as it is possible to get, and I know which option I prefer.

I mean, how can we take any of this seriously? Belmondo’s Louis is, basically, a complete child, Deneuve implausibly unreal for a grifter and for all their talk of needing money we never see them truly suffering from its lack. What we do see are two people madly in love with each other and a director madly in love with cinema (at one point Truffaut even flashes the word ‘CINEMA’ in big red capital letters just so we get the idea, although considering this is a 1960’s French New Wave film we’d have been more surprised if he hadn’t done something like that).

Also, for all the psychological manipulation, murder and theft going on there’s no real violence at play: an act of treachery becomes coquettish flirtation; emotional withdrawal an excuse for returning to intimacy. Is this really a lethally treacherous situation or simply a relationship searching for balance? Love hurts, the film might be telling us, but the alternative is its total rejection to avoid the hard work of constant negotiation and renewal.

Watching ‘Mississippi Mermaid’ you can understand why Spielberg cast Truffaut as Lacombe in ‘Close Encounters’ (1977) because there’s a dangerously childlike aspect to both movies and men. Indeed, the two films are almost identical with Belmondo’s Louis bearing a striking similarity to Roy Neary as he allows himself to be taken away by an unearthly being into white heavenly realms with his naivety not only intact but positively validated. The only difference is Deneuve is more luminous than any alien spaceship.

Based on Cornell Woolrich’s novel, ‘Waltz into Darkness’, it’s easy to imagine this tale as a descent into the terrifying abyss. Instead, Truffaut turns it into a charm, an excuse to exist within an unhealthy relationship for a while without suffering the consequences. I guess that’s what’s also called ‘a movie’, a machine for feeding us pleasures. We only need to lie back and open our mouths for the delicacies to be dropped in — those blues of the ocean, those lush greens, Belmondo climbing the outside of her building like a cat or waxing lyrical about love in front of that sunset. How can anybody walk away from all this?

I’m still somewhat agnostic on Truffaut, by far preferring Godard’s acidic bite, but this might be my favourite of his movies, which I guess explains my response to the film’s final question — where are they going? I don’t know, would be my reply, but I want to go with them.

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Colin Edwards
Colin Edwards

Written by Colin Edwards

Comedy writer, radio producer and director of large scale audio features.

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