# Mississippi Mermaid
**Mississippi Mermaid** (French: *La Sirène du Mississipi*) is a 1969 French romantic thriller directed by [François Truffaut](https://www.edgepedia.org/francois-truffaut), starring [Jean-Paul Belmondo](https://www.edgepedia.org/jean-paul-belmondo) as a Réunion tobacco planter and [Catherine Deneuve](https://www.edgepedia.org/catherine-deneuve) as the impostor who answers his mail-order marriage advertisement. Adapted from the novel *Waltz into Darkness* by William Irish, the pen name of Cornell Woolrich, it was Truffaut's most expensive production to date, a box office failure on release, and later the subject of critical reappraisal after 13 minutes cut from its American release were restored.[1](https://kinolorber.com/film/mississippi-mermaid) • [2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/184992/mississippi-mermaid)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Original title | *La Sirène du Mississipi* (spelled with one "p" in the French title)[3](https://www.cnc.fr/cinema/actualites/saga-de-lete---la-sirene-du-mississipi--cap-sur-lile-de-la-reunion_1739265) |
| Director / writers | François Truffaut, from the novel *Waltz into Darkness* by William Irish (Cornell Woolrich)[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/184992/mississippi-mermaid) |
| Cast | Jean-Paul Belmondo (Louis Mahé), Catherine Deneuve (Julie Roussel/Marion Vergano), Michel Bouquet (Comolli), Nelly Borgeaud (Berthe)[1](https://kinolorber.com/film/mississippi-mermaid) |
| Release | 18 June 1969 in France, distributed by United Artists[4](https://www.ccc-grenoble.fr/cineclub/un-crime-dans-la-tete/item/download/426_311756077ce317c6fddcf9dfac5ff184.html) |
| Runtime / format | 123 minutes, color, Cinemascope (2.35:1)[1](https://kinolorber.com/film/mississippi-mermaid) |
| Key crew | Cinematography Denys Clerval, music Antoine Duhamel, editing Agnès Guillemot, production design Claude Pignot[5](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2008/cteq/mississippi-mermaid/) |
| Production | Les Films du Carrosse, Les Productions Artistes Associés, Produzioni Associate Delphos; producers Marcel Berbert and Truffaut[5](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2008/cteq/mississippi-mermaid/) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
Louis Mahé (Belmondo), a wealthy tobacco plantation owner on Réunion island in the Indian Ocean, becomes engaged through a newspaper personal column to a woman named Julie Roussel. When Julie (Deneuve) arrives by the riverboat [Mississippi](https://www.edgepedia.org/mississippi), from which the film takes its English title, she resembles neither her photograph nor the woman Louis imagined from her letters, but he is enchanted and marries her anyway. Julie then vanishes, taking the entire balance of Louis's bank account.[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/184992/mississippi-mermaid)
Louis learns from Berthe Roussel (Nelly Borgeaud) that her sister is missing and that someone impersonated her on the arrival boat. With the private detective Comolli (Michel Bouquet), Louis tracks the impostor to Antibes, where she confesses that her name is Marion and that she was partner in crime with Richard (Roland Thénot), who robbed and murdered the real Julie. Louis, still infatuated, forgives her, and the couple go on the run from police seeking Marion for murder, through southern France to an isolated cabin in the [French Alps](https://www.edgepedia.org/french-alps), where Louis discovers Marion's true nature and she begins administering rat poison to him.[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/184992/mississippi-mermaid) • [6](https://girard.perso.math.cnrs.fr/FILMS.pdf)
Truffaut transposed the novel's [Deep South](https://www.edgepedia.org/deep-south) setting to Réunion and changed Irish's downbeat ending to a more open-ended fadeout, saying, "You must never end a spectacle on a downward curve. Life may descend into degradation, old age and death, but a spectacle must exalt and uplift."[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/184992/mississippi-mermaid)
## Production
Truffaut had long wanted to work with both leads. The project reached him two years earlier with [Brigitte Bardot](https://www.edgepedia.org/brigitte-bardot) attached, but he refused: "It will be Catherine Deneuve or no one." He waited, then bought the rights with money lent to him by [Jeanne Moreau](https://www.edgepedia.org/jeanne-moreau).[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/184992/mississippi-mermaid) Belmondo liked the novel and accepted without waiting for a script, since Truffaut planned to write most of the dialogue during the shoot, as he had almost always done on his French films; the screenwriter wrote the dialogues the night before shooting each day.[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/184992/mississippi-mermaid) • [7](https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/2004/10/19/les-secrets-de-fabrication-les-rages-et-les-indiscretions-de-francois-truffaut_383603_1819218.html)
Truffaut shot the film in sequence, a practice he rarely used, and in Cinemascope so that he could keep the two stars on screen together rather than filming them separately as star vehicles typically did.[8](https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/truffaut-s-restored-mermaid-surfaces-3083910.php) • [2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/184992/mississippi-mermaid) It was his first big-budget production, shot on Réunion, in the south of France, and in the French Alps.[9](https://www.villagevoice.com/women-on-top/) It was also the only film Belmondo ever made under Truffaut's direction.[10](https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-67655/secrets-tournage/)
The shoot marked the beginning of a relationship between Truffaut and Deneuve that lasted after the film and shaped his work afterward; the film scholar Anne Gillain, author of *Totally Truffaut*, writes that the film marks the start of a relationship imprinted in most of his subsequent films.[11](https://www.lemonde.fr/a-la-une/article/2007/03/05/catherine-deneuve-argent-politique-et-vie-privee_879008_3208.html) • [12](https://academic.oup.com/book/41541/chapter-abstract/352991035)
## Reception and restoration
The initial critical response was decidedly mixed. *Variety* called it an uneven film mixing a love story, femme duality, and suspense without achieving the cohesion of Truffaut's recent pictures, and the British critic Derek Elly wrote that the director seemed unsure whether he was making a thriller, an homage, or a love story. The film was a box office flop, and Truffaut admitted that cuts made for economy had cost the narrative clarity and plausibility, and that the casting of Belmondo and Deneuve created audience expectations his treatment did not meet. "As those who don't like it constitute 95%, I have to admit something went wrong," he wrote.[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/184992/mississippi-mermaid)
Truffaut himself attributed the failure to the film's reversed gender roles: "I treated Jean-Paul Belmondo like a young virgin girl and I treated Catherine Deneuve like an adventurer. It was the inversion of the sexes and I think that shocked people."[13](https://adrc-asso.org/patrimoine/diffusion/films-et-cycles/la-sirene-du-mississipi)
The American release, cut by [United Artists](https://www.edgepedia.org/united-artists) apparently for length, ran 111 minutes with seven scenes totaling 13 minutes removed. A restored version with a new widescreen print, presented at a 1999 Truffaut retrospective at San Francisco's Castro Theatre, returned those scenes, which give the film a clarity it lacked and flesh out the characters in ways that justify their actions.[8](https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/truffaut-s-restored-mermaid-surfaces-3083910.php) Since then the film has been reappraised: David Thomson, author of *The New Biographical Dictionary of Film*, wrote that it "actually masters Hitchcockian themes and turns into a rhapsody on a fatal obsession," and the [San Francisco Chronicle](https://www.edgepedia.org/san-francisco-chronicle)'s Edward Guthmann called the restored film "a cool combo of film noir, star vehicle and picaresque romance."[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/184992/mississippi-mermaid)
## Hitchcock, Woolrich, and intertextuality
The film belongs to Truffaut's most openly Hitchcockian period. Amy Taubin, the film critic writing in *The Village Voice*, described it as largely a remake of *Vertigo* (1958), with Deneuve and Belmondo in the [Kim Novak](https://www.edgepedia.org/kim-novak) and [James Stewart](https://www.edgepedia.org/james-stewart) roles, though its direct source was Woolrich's story rather than the Boileau-Narcejac novel behind *Vertigo*. Woolrich also wrote the stories behind Hitchcock's *Rear Window* and Truffaut's previous film, *The Bride Wore Black* (1968).[9](https://www.villagevoice.com/women-on-top/) A 2016 academic study by Garcia-Manso analyzes the film's thematic and iconographic parallels with both *Vertigo* and Hitchcock's *Marnie* (1964).[14](https://eurekamag.com/research/105/956/105956558.php)
The film is dedicated to [Jean Renoir](https://www.edgepedia.org/jean-renoir), and Taubin also identifies Truffaut's New Wave rival [Jean-Luc Godard](https://www.edgepedia.org/jean-luc-godard) as an influence, noting that Godard's *Pierrot le fou* (1966) starred Belmondo in an almost identical role, a conventional middle-class man destroyed by passion for an enigmatic woman.[9](https://www.villagevoice.com/women-on-top/) The TCM essay by Jeff Stafford catalogs further homages, including to [Honoré de Balzac](https://www.edgepedia.org/honore-de-balzac), Nicholas Ray, Jean Cocteau, Humphrey Bogart, and Truffaut's own *Shoot the Piano Player* (1960), whose snowy mountain cabin hideout reappears for the climax.[2](https://www.tcm.com/articles/184992/mississippi-mermaid)
## Afterlife
Truffaut paid the film his own tribute in *The Last Metro* (1980), reusing almost word for word the dialogue between Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve from the fire-side scene between Belmondo and Deneuve, and François Ozon later placed the same speech in Deneuve's mouth in *8 Femmes*.[3](https://www.cnc.fr/cinema/actualites/saga-de-lete---la-sirene-du-mississipi--cap-sur-lile-de-la-reunion_1739265) The story was remade, unmemorably in the CNC's judgment, as *Original Sin* (2001) by Michael Cristofer, with Antonio Banderas and Angelina Jolie.[3](https://www.cnc.fr/cinema/actualites/saga-de-lete---la-sirene-du-mississipi--cap-sur-lile-de-la-reunion_1739265) Kino Lorber issued the film on Blu-ray in 2023 in its KL Studio Classics line, with audio commentary by the film historians Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman.[15](https://www.kpl.gov/catalog/item/?i=ent%3A%2F%2FSD_ILS%2F0%2FSD_ILS%3A1956015)
## References
1. [Mississippi Mermaid, Kino Lorber Theatrical](https://kinolorber.com/film/mississippi-mermaid)
2. [Mississippi Mermaid, by Jeff Stafford, Turner Classic Movies](https://www.tcm.com/articles/184992/mississippi-mermaid)
3. [Saga de l'été : « La Sirène du Mississipi », cap sur l'île de la Réunion, CNC](https://www.cnc.fr/cinema/actualites/saga-de-lete---la-sirene-du-mississipi--cap-sur-lile-de-la-reunion_1739265)
4. [La sirène du Mississipi, Ciné-club Grenoble fiche technique](https://www.ccc-grenoble.fr/cineclub/un-crime-dans-la-tete/item/download/426_311756077ce317c6fddcf9dfac5ff184.html)
5. [Mississippi Mermaid, Jonathan Dawson, Senses of Cinema, April 2008](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2008/cteq/mississippi-mermaid/)
6. [La sirène du Mississippi, film notes, Girard](https://girard.perso.math.cnrs.fr/FILMS.pdf)
7. [François Truffaut : ses secrets de fabrication, Le Monde archives](https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/2004/10/19/les-secrets-de-fabrication-les-rages-et-les-indiscretions-de-francois-truffaut_383603_1819218.html)
8. [Truffaut's restored "Mermaid" surfaces, G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Examiner, May 14, 1999](https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/truffaut-s-restored-mermaid-surfaces-3083910.php)
9. [Women on Top, Amy Taubin, The Village Voice, January 12, 1999](https://www.villagevoice.com/women-on-top/)
10. [Anecdotes du film La Sirène du Mississipi, AlloCiné](https://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm-67655/secrets-tournage/)
11. [Catherine Deneuve : argent, politique et vie privée, Le Monde](https://www.lemonde.fr/a-la-une/article/2007/03/05/catherine-deneuve-argent-politique-et-vie-privee_879008_3208.html)
12. [Anne Gillain, Mississippi Mermaid (1969), in Totally Truffaut, Oxford Academic, 2021](https://academic.oup.com/book/41541/chapter-abstract/352991035)
13. [La Sirène du Mississipi, ADRC (Truffaut INA interview quotation)](https://adrc-asso.org/patrimoine/diffusion/films-et-cycles/la-sirene-du-mississipi)
14. [Garcia-Manso, A., Intertextuality and metacinema in François Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid, Quintana 15, 2016](https://eurekamag.com/research/105/956/105956558.php)
15. [Mississippi mermaid = La sirène du Mississipi, Kalamazoo Public Library catalog](https://www.kpl.gov/catalog/item/?i=ent%3A%2F%2FSD_ILS%2F0%2FSD_ILS%3A1956015)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Film noir and neo-noir films › Released 1940 to 1975*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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