caveat emptor: I will pretty much lay bare the plot of La sirène du Mississippi in what follows. I do not believe this would spoil the film for a reader who subsequently sees it; my reasoning on this point is elucidated in, and maybe by, the essay. However, anyone concerned about the possibility might do well to forgo reading this piece until after seeing the film.

All I knew about François Truffaut‘s  La sirène du Mississippi as I walked into the Hollywood Theatre a week ago was that it was based on a pulp novel (Waltz into Darkness) by Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968), whose name I recognize though I have never read him. Truffaut’s La mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black) (1968) is also based on a Woolrich novel, and Alfred Hitchcock turned Woolrich’s story “It Had to Be Murder” into Rear Window (1954), which gives him a pedigree that may count for something.

La sirène is by no stretch a great film and possibly not even a very good film. Made in 1969, it dates from the middle years of Truffaut’s career, coming after the new wave classics Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) (1959) and Jules et Jim (1962) and before the fine later films La nuit américaine (Day for Night) (1973), L’histoire d’Adèle H. (The Story of Adele H) 1975, L’argent de poche (Small Change) (1976), and Le dernier métro (The Last Metro) (1980), and it pales by comparison to any of them. Even so, I can scarcely imagine any film by Truffaut and certainly not one starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve could be completely devoid of interest, so last weekend I trekked up to the Hollywood to check it out.

The plot is a fairly ridiculous, noirish melodrama. Louis Mahé (Belmondo) owns a tobacco plantation and cigarette factory on the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. As the film opens he is off to the docks to meet his fiancée for the first time after an epistolary romance that began with her response to his ad in the personals column. Tension mounts as the passengers disembark from the Mississippi just arrived from New Caledonia and none of them resembles Mahé’s photo of Julie Roussel. Mahé returns dejectedly to his car, where a woman holding a cage with a canary introduces herself as Julie, his fiancée. She offers a lame explanation for having sent a photo of a friend instead of herself, and Mahé is not overly inclined to question this discovery that his wife to be looks a lot like the breathtakingly beautiful young Catherine Deneuve.

Pretty soon little things occur that do not add up, Julie’s behavior is peculiar if not downright suspicious, and should the audience fail to pick up on the obvious, Truffaut the director gleefully employs brief bursts of suspenseful music to announce she is not what she seems, watch out, this dame is up to something. It comes shortly after Mahé gets the bright idea to put his bank accounts, business and personal, in both their names, when Julie cleans out both accounts and disappears.

Mahé is so devastated he decides to take a vacation in the south of France, leaving the plantation and tobacco factory in the hands of Jardine, his manager. It is not clear where the funds for this come from given that only a token sum is left in his accounts and that only because both their signatures would be required to close them out. Clearly such a trivial detail cannot be allowed to get in the way of the ever thickening plot.

The stress gets to Mahé and he suffers a nervous breakdown on the plane to France and is hospitalized in Marseilles. While watching TV in the patients’ lounge, he catches a TV news snippet about a snazzy new night club that caters to an upscale male clientele. There before his shocked eyes appears his wife, a scantily clad hostess dancing with the club’s patrons.

Without further ado  Mahé is out of the hospital, buying a gun, lurking outside the club, and following the woman he knows as Julie Roussel back to her apartment. He goes there to kill her, but before he pulls the trigger she tells her story, how she is really Marion Vergano, an orphan who  came to impersonate Julie Roussel in a scheme concocted by her lowlife boyfriend, who dumped her and kept all the money after she cleaned out  Mahé’s accounts. She really came to love him, she said, despite the deceit, and she is after all the breathtakingly beautiful young Catherine Deneuve, so he buys her declaration of love, which is true enough after its fashion and off they go to make a life together.

There is a problem. Before he left Reunion, Mahé was visited by Berthe Roussel, who confirmed the woman he married was not her sister Julie. They hired a private detective named Comolli (Michel Bouquet) to track down the impersonator and find out what really happened to Julie Roussel. Comolli jumps on the case, which is far more intriguing than the business that usually comes his way. He may be a small-time operative with a shabby office in a little town on a nondescript island in the Indian Ocean, but he is known for his dogged persistence. He takes only one case at a time, and he sees it through to the end.

Naturally he tracks Mahé and Marion to Aix en Provence, where they are renting a house in the country.  Mahé panics and shoots the detective. They bury him in the cellar and flee to Lyon. Things go smoothly there for a time until a flood in Aix washes up the body. One day they return to their hotel to find it swarming with cops, and they must flee again. Mahé believes they should head for the border and cross over into Switzerland. Marion wants to go to Paris. She always wants to go to Paris, but Mahé is convinced the authorities will nab them at once if they go to Paris. Over Marion’s protests they head for the border.

Ordinarily one should not reveal so much of the plot when writing about a film or a novel. I believe it is permissible in this instance because the plot is not what really matters. La sirène du Mississippi is ostensibly a thriller, but the suspense generated is not of the kind that draws the audience to the edge of their seats wondering what is going to happen next. Our heart is not in our throat feeling and fearing for what will become of Mahé and Marion. Rather, we wonder what improbable turn of events the director will pull out of his hat next.

The fugitives are ordinary people who find themselves in out of their depth as events pull them along. They do not plan, only react to whatever circumstance that confronts them at given moment. Mahé is supposed to be a successful businessman but does not seem particularly clever or bright. He tends to react with either a blind panic or bland resignation. Marion is not altogether unsympathetic, but she is grasping, materialistic, and pretty much lacking in moral sensibility. She suffers no pangs of conscience over the deaths of Julie Roussel and Comolli, nor for that matter does Mahé.

Mahé wins out and they take refuge in a deserted house near the border, waiting for the weekend when he is convinced it will be easier to sneak across into Switzerland. How he would know such a detail is of no great matter. Wanting to go to Paris, or least buy things for which Mahé insists they have no money, Marion gets ticked off and puts rat poison in his broth. When Mahé figures out what is up, he tells her to fill his cup with more broth. He loves her and regrets nothing. She cries that she is not worthy of such love. They are in one another’s arms again, and the film ends with the two of them walking toward the border through the forest in the swirling snow. As the figures blur in the distance, “FIN” (The End) flashes in the upper left corner of the screen.

Even a bad film may have moments that are sublime. In La sirène such moments derive foremost from Truffaut’s flaunting of the conventions of the suspense genre, from plot twists that border on the absurd, to the name of the detective, which I imagine comes from Jean-Louis Comolli (1941– ), writer, editor, and film director,  editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma 1966– 1978), to the use of music to convey danger or maybe just that someone is up to no good, to ordinary people caught up in nefarious affairs to which they respond with foolish moves or outright panic that just sucks them deeper and deeper into a situation from which they cannot escape. They are not gangsters or pimps, bent cops, or corrupt politicians, not people we would at first thought think of as evil. Yet in the end they commit crimes, even murder, without compunction or conscience. They are not Raskolnikovs who agonize over actions for which they are compelled to concoct an intellectual justification. Like capitalists they act instinctively from self-interest. There is no other consideration.

:: Sep.12.2010 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »