Word: mermaids
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...What did the Little Mermaid have to give up to get legs...
...Thenier (Michel Duchaussoy), learns the identity of the hit-and-run murderer by a convenient accident. Are villains too often betes noiresl The driver is a child-beating, wife-torturing, mistress-abusing salaud. Does the pursuer fall in love with his quarry-as Belmondo did with Deneuve in Mississippi Mermaid! The villain's mistress (Caroline Cellier) is a lodestar of beauty and melancholia. Naturally, Charles is smitten...
Mississippi Mermaid, and dozens of other French mysteries, were abject hommages to American directors of the recent past. This Man Must Die pays an older debt. As Charles seeks his son's killer, his self-examinations are not reminiscent of a contemporary detective but of Ulysses on some unchartable mental voyage. Indeed, Chabrol makes poetic use of the wine-dark sea and refers constantly to the ancient legends of death and vengeance...
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...
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...