Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Never mind the loopholes, just look at Deneuve!, 28 Aug 2005
By A Customer
I liked this film, despite the implausible elements. Deneuve is great to look at throughout and is topless twice...hooray! The loopholes can make you stop caring about the film, but the two leads draw you in, so you watch just to see what happens to them. Good ending too.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
one lonely heart and one heartless loner, 24 Feb 2009
What I liked about this Truffaut offering was the manner in which a stiched up millionaire is willing to sacrifice everything to keep a dangerously egotistical Siren by his side. Reason (she's a fake), logic (what! joint bank accounts) and rationality (loving her!) is conveniently discarded and replaced by a hypnotic obssession that subverts conventional notions of love being a bilateral acceptance of mutual respect, mental and physical infatuation and shared spiritual identity. Instead here we have the unbelievably beautiful Deneuve who only has to "sing" (albeit in disguise) to attract her victim towards his doom. A woman who is free with her body, criminal and murderous. But perhaps this is exactly what is wanted by our hero: a life precariously balanced between the erotically charged needs (a sort of intense emotional high) of the present and a fatalistic attitude to the future. The final scene is marvelous because, for me, it summed up the essence of the film: a love story, bizarre, but nevertheless a loving union between two souls.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The bones are here for a nice, nasty tale of self-destructive obsession, but then there's all that stuff about finding true love, 20 Aug 2008
"Julie, you are adorable," says Louis Mahe (Jean-Paul Belmondo) to his beautiful new mail-order bride, Julie Rousel (Catherine Deneuve). "Do you know what that means? `Adorable'. It means worthy of adoration." Louis is a wealthy tobacco grower and cigarette manufacturer on the French island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. When Julie arrived on the island, she didn't look like the photograph she had sent him when she agreed to be his wife. She says she was timid and decided to send the photograph of her sister. Louis is enchanted by her beauty and understands her caution. They marry, and Louis becomes a husband deeply happy. He tells her she is worthy of adoration just a day or two after he arranges to change his personal and business accounts into joint accounts. That evening, Julie has disappeared, cleaning out both accounts. Louis goes to France, has a breakdown, and then by chance sees Julie in a newscast about a new nightclub and the women there who are hostesses. Louis learns she is really a woman named Marion Vergano. Marion's history would lead only the most obsessed of men to think a happy ending could be in the cards. Most of the movie places us in France after Louis has found her and accepted her as Marion Vergano
Mississippi Mermaid, written and directed by Francois Truffaut, is a movie of Louis' obsession, of sexual psychosis, of parasitic selfishness, of stolen identity and of rat poison, with a lot of self-revealing (some of it even true) dialogue thrown in. As much as I think comparing one director to another is usually pointless, in this case Truffaut may have watched Vertigo, Psycho and Marnie once too often. Still, murder at the top of the stairs, the star power of Deneuve and Belmondo and some eccentric passing opinions (Louis thinks Johnny Guitar is "a love story, with lots of feeling in it."), all handled with Truffaut's characteristic confidence isn't something to pass by. The downside is that Mississippi Mermaid, despite all of its advantages, at times veers too close to melodramatic parody.
"You mustn't cry, my dear. It's your happiness I want, not your tears."
"I'm learning what love is, Louis. It's painful. It hurts me." It sounds better in French, but the meaning is just as soppy.
Truffaut adapted his movie from the pulp mystery novel, Waltz into Darkness, by Cornell Woolrich writing as William Irish. The movie didn't do too well the first time out, but then underwent a rediscovery of sorts. Unfortunately, that meant articles by people who teach film studies at universities. One such person wrote, "[Mississippi Mermaid] remains a fascinating exploration of the major themes essayed by movie melodramas of betrayal - a sort of distillation of the amoral nucleus of Double Indemnity and the wilder settings of Key Largo." Distillation of the amoral nucleus? I don't even know what an amoral nucleus is. The salient point, for me, is that films such as Double Indemnity and Key Largo are above all else tightly told stories. I think Truffaut with Mississippi Mermaid started with a nice, nasty, obsessional pulp tale, but then tried to do too much with it.
The DVD is not anamorphic. The transfer is nothing special. There are no extras.
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