Another friend had recently recommended François Truffaut's Jules and Jim....and since then it is always on my mind.
Mississippi Mermaid left me reeling. It had elements of Mulholland Drive (beautiful blonde woman who changes name/character, yet remains the same multi-faceted woman), and the lyrics of Tina Turner ("Whats Love Got To Do With It?" + "Private Dancer"). That sounds messy, and it is. But it has searing flashes of brilliance that burned me with its emotional stabs.
Jules and Jim was all about kindness, fragility, sexual exploration, and honesty. Mississippi Mermaid is all about cruelty, coarseness, sexual exploitation, and deception. Both movies tell a fascinating story about human nature.
Wikipedia info:
Mississippi Mermaid (French: La sirène du Mississippi) (1969) is a French film directed by François Truffaut. The film is adapted from the 1947 William Irish (Cornell Woolrich) novel Waltz into Darkness. The film features Jean-Paul Belmondo, Catherine Deneuve, and others.
Plot:
Truffaut juggles an Hitchcockian suspense/thriller with deepening sexual obsession. Louis (Jean-Paul Belmondo) owns a tobacco plantation and cigarette factory on Réunion Island, but it's lonely work — so he sends away for a mail-order bride.
Much to his surprise, the beautiful young Julie Roussel (Catherine Deneuve) arrives by ship (the Mississippi Mermaid of the title), looking nothing like the picture he had received by mail. Louis quickly falls for Julie, while discovering that she is decidedly not the woman with whom he had been corresponding.
La sirène du Mississippi is playing at BAM Rose Cinemas on Fri, Jul 10—Sun, Jul 12 / Mon, Jul 13—Thu, Jul 16.
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