Dedicated to Renoir, stylized like Hitchcock, this gritty, shifty, noir-laden steamer is yet another example of Truffaut’s fascination with the American B-movie. Ice queen Catherine Deneuve pairs up with new wave king Jean-Paul Belmondo, together forming a seductive web of burglary, murder, blackmail and deception. You know, classic noir stuff, only not as muddled but still as tedious. Thrills of sexual obsession call forth Buñuel, visual iconography ventures into Hitchcock, and there’s even a splash of PHANTOM THREAD (2017) masochism at play that turns sickness into arousal, murder into romance. It’s an icy, pitch-black ode to classical genre pictures, the kind Truffaut adored and sought to emulate throughout his career. Much more cynical, too, than the Antoine Doinel series, which…

Mississippi Mermaid is an incredibly hard movie to find a copy of. That being said, it made it all the more special seeing it.
 
From what I've read, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, but Truffaut was never really proud of this one. I can see why, probably having migraines on set from dealing with MGM, being a massive flop in the US, but it's really a shame. Mississippi Mermaid doesn't stand as one of Truffaut's strongest feats of cinema, but like the rest of his body of work, his films are masterpieces in quiet, subtle ways.

What draws me to Truffaut so fervently are his depictions of love. For all the love triangles and adulterous relationships he'd…

“É difícil se conhecer verdadeiramente”. François Truffaut versa sobre a desconstrução de uma relação a dois. Como um observador, tal feito já fica evidente, no prólogo, quando a câmera se posiciona no banco traseiro do carro do protagonista Jean-Paul Belmondo. O homem que se permite a um casamento arranjado com Catherine Deneuve, mas que se fragmenta ao descobrir que nem tudo são flores. Ela, alguém que finge ser: assume a identidade de outra. Ele, permite-se à sedução. Logo, a relação se fixa em ironias. O filme parece uma farsa, um tom de suspense que condiciona o romance dúbio de cena. Quase um Hitchcock que emula. A apreensão dos personagens em meio aos segredos e a instabilidade emocional, tornam a curiosidade…