Popular reviews

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★ 24

  François Truffaut has too pure a heart to squeeze even a guilty glee out of portraying hostile relationships. 

  While the Nouvelle Vague icon can execute a sudden death with the best of them, he never quite reaches a proficiency in confrontation and manipulation that equals that of Godard, or his own icon; Hitchcock. 

  “Mississippi Mermaid,” though, is Truffaut trying with all his good soul to make a noir with the grandiose ‘his and hers’ deceit of Hitchcock’s own masterpieces of manipulation: “To Catch a Thief,” “Suspicion,” and “Under Capricorn.” 

  From “Capricorn,” the Hitchcock period drama that Nouvelle Vague auteurs rediscovered and championed, Truffaut takes the nation of exiles turned plantation owners conceit, transposing it to Réunion island. “Mermaid” pulls one…

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  Review by ryan ★★★

  Throwback to when it was romantic to put your wife's face on a cigarette package design.

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  Review by phoebe 💫 ★★★★ 1

  feel like pure shite just want to watch horny French movies

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  Review by ro ★★★★ 1

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  im just like jean-paul belmondo because i too would forgive catherine deneuve if she catfished, stole my entire fortune and poisoned me

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  Review by nora ★★★★

  i love when truffaut finally got to work with belmondo it was this horny melodrama/crime thriller movie about how catherine deneuve scams a plantation owner out of all his money and the relationship arc has like five different stages and they all work somehow. god it’s so fun. truffaut said something about how it doesn’t matter if you make a bad film in a far-away location because then at least you have a trip to a far-away location, not implying this is bad at all (it’s actually very literary and moody and clearly moving away from the hitchcockian stylistic influence at this point thank god) it’s just that it wasn’t that well-received at the time. so this is just to say i’m glad françois got less concerned about critics, or anyone’s opinions at all, over time—i aspire to that!!!

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  Review by Graham ★★★

  No mermaids.
  No sign of Mississippi.
  Pfft, I've been duped just like JP Belmondo, who in a 60s prequel to internet dating thought he'd snagged the perfect mail-order wife, without ever meeting her.

  She rocks up on his home island, and it's only bloody Catherine Deneuve. Remember, this is the same JP Belmondo who worked his way through an array of spectacularly beautiful and strong women in his career including Anna Karina, Jean Seberg and Sophia Loren, and generally managed to totally stuff it up big-time.

  La Sirène du Mississipi is a nice enough romantic crime thriller, but it lacks a certain something. You know, that spark that happens when two great performers connect. This time, I just didn't feel it, and the film suffered as a result.

  ---
  The Criterion Challenge 2022 - 41. Starring Catherine Deneuve

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  Review by pirateneckbeard ★★ 2

  Can't say this was all that good. I was looking forward to this with two heavyweight french leads and a director with an illustrious career that I have for the most points have enjoyed. I get what it's trying to be but something in the batter makes this cake a flop. So many things that I felt I had to go with in order to work it eventually just taxed my acceptance of plausibility. I did enjoy the settings and Jean-Paul Belmondo(Louis) and Catherine Deneuve(Julie/...) are fun to watch but there wasn't much chemistry between the two. The settings were fun to see for what it's worth. I treat this film as a Truffaut experiment that didn't work but respect him for always trying something a little different adding new colours to his painters palette.

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  Review by BrandonHabes ★★½

  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…

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  Review by Jaime Rebanal ★★★½

  I suppose this is proof that Breathless worked better in Jean-Luc Godard's hands than it did in François Truffaut's.

  Still a lot of fun, and the two leads are always a delight.

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  Review by Aldo ★★★★½ 2

  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…

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  Review by I.V. ★★★½

  The first hour contains some of Truffaut’s most ruthlessly efficient storytelling (and his best pure set-piece), but once the subject turns to l’amour fou, the film curdles into an impression of early-to-mid ‘60s Godard: cars, unfinished apartments, alienated noir plotting, endless “women are like this, men are like that” routines. The problem is that Truffaut’s tastes in movie-movie form and quotation don’t extend to zigzag deconstruction; he remains ever the morbid romantic.

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  Review by Marie

  Catherine Deneuve takes off her top and a passing motorist swerves directly into a pole.......in that moment, he is all of us.

  
  Was this so much Hitchcock pastiche/homage that it became derivative? Not more so than most other thrillers, and it was better than them anyway. I feel like I'm giving a lukewarm review, and I’m not: I LOVED watching this.