Word: truffauts
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...captured. It was a boy of about twelve, origins unknown, with vulpine instincts and capacities. This Mowgli-like creature became renowned in his own time; a hundred years later, he was an object of fascination for Educator Maria Montessori. Now the cycle begins anew with this work by Francois Truffaut. At first the mud-caked curiosity (Jean-Pierre Cargol) is treated as a zoo animal, visited by Parisians who applaud his pathetic growls and tantrums. Mercifully -or so it seems-the child is taken in tow by Dr. Itard (played by Truffaut himself). The primitive behaviorist names his charge Victor...
...Actor Truffaut, decked in frock coat and silk hat, is a splendid blend of pomposity and curiosity. But Director Truffaut is lethargic and clinical. The Wild Child is never touched by his characteristic warmth; its ironies are all predictable, save the final one: this is Truffaut's crudest work, as if it were the first film in the canon and not the latest...
François 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...
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...