Truffaut in Transition

Franc,ois Truffaut has often spoken of his affection for rapid and startling changes of mood. Shoot the Piano Player careened crazily from farce to thriller, and interludes of pastoral bliss alternated smoothly with scenes of excruciating emotional warfare in Jules and Jim. In these films, Truffaut mingled the various moods; in The Mississippi Mermaid, he segregates them severely. The first half of the film is a thrilling tale of obsession that slides--almost imperceptibly--into an ironic and slightly fanciful romance. The result is certainly Truffaut's smoothest, most professional piece of film making. It is just as certainly not his best.

This is the third film--Jules and Jim and The Bride Wore Black are the others--in which Truffaut has dealt in detail with the character of a mysterious woman who enchants, dominates and finally controls men. Like Bride, Truffaut's The Mississippi Mermaid is based on a thriller by the American Cornell Woolrich, and like its predecessor, it deals with a predatory female and a weak male, whom she eventually destroys. Julie (to emphasize the similarity, the name is repeated from The Bride Wore Black) is an elegant mail-order bride with a Saint Laurent wardrobe who has come to the French island of Reunion to meet her future husband, a wealthy tobacco farmer named Louis. From the photographs they exchanged by letter, she is almost unrecognizable. He had expected a sweet but faintly dowdy brunette; she meets him as a startlingly glamorous blonde. They confess to each other that they lied in their letters so that they would not be married for the wrong motives. He said that he was a factory foreman with a modest income; she sent her sister's photograph.

Satisfied with the explanation, Louis marries her and they live for a time in blissful luxury. Eventually, through a series of small incongruities of history and personality, Louis discovers that he has been tricked. It is too late. She has left him, taking few of her clothes but almost all of his bank account. In nervous shock, he goes to France to recover. He sees her one night by chance on a television news film. He pursues her; she confesses. He takes her back, and--after he has shot a persistent private detective--they both become fugitives from the law.

Pathology of Obsession. Truffaut dedicates the film to his idol, Jean Renoir, and The Mississippi Mermaid begins with scenes from Renoir's 1938 masterpiece La Marseillaise. There are many more affinities here, though, with the work of another Truffaut deity, Alfred Hitchcock. As Julie, Catherine Deneuve has all the frosty, mysterious elegance of such typical Hitchcock heroines as Ingrid Bergman and Grace Kelly. Jean-Paul Belmondo, as Louis, has the distinctively empathetic star quality that Hitchcock has always favored in his leading men.

To be sure, there are signs of Renoir's influence, especially in the careful photography of the lush island vegetation and in the continuing use of long camera angles. But thematically The Mississippi Mermaid owes everything to Hitchcock; it might even, in fact, be called Truffaut's Vertigo. Both films are about the pathology of obsession, about role reversal, about the power that women have over men. Only in their denouements do the films differ in a substantial way. The hero of Vertigo drives the woman to her death, but in The Mississippi Mermaid the hero is willing to accept his own murder as the final humiliation from the woman he loves. In the guise of a romantic fadeout, the last scene of The Mississippi Mermaid represents the ultimate irony, the final sharp thrust of Truffaut's cynicism.

This misanthropy is what ultimately is so troublesome about this otherwise exciting and often beautiful film. Truffaut, at 38, stands at a crucial point in his career. His infatuation with the Hitchcock style has carried him now through two direct hommages to the master, and it is time to stop. The easy cynicism toward human relationships so often evident in Hitchcock does not really suit Truffaut. He is much more the humanist, the man who both feared and loved the predatory Catherine in Jules and Jim. The titular dedication of the film to Renoir and the implicit--and now excessive--tribute to Hitchcock perfectly portrays Truffaut's own artistic schizophrenia. Caught between two masters, Truffaut must make his choice. Recent news of his newest film, a dramatization of the true story of a retarded country boy in 18th century France, seems to indicate that the director has chosen Renoir. It also means that he has chosen wisely and well.

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