Mississippi Mermaid
| Mississippi Mermaid | |
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French theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | François Truffaut |
| Produced by |
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| Written by | François Truffaut |
| Based on |
Waltz into Darkness by William Irish |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Antoine Duhamel |
| Cinematography | Denys Clerval |
| Edited by | Agnès Guillemot |
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Production
company |
Les Films du Carrosse
Produzioni Associate Delphos |
| Distributed by | United Artists |
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Release date
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Running time
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123 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Budget | $1,600,000 |
| Box office | $7,356,464 1,227,693 admissions (France) |
Mississippi Mermaid (French: La sirène du Mississipi) is a 1969 French romantic drama film directed by François Truffaut and starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Adapted from the 1947 novel Waltz into Darkness by Cornell Woolrich, the film is about a tobacco planter on Réunion island in the Indian Ocean who becomes engaged through correspondence to a woman he does not know. When she arrives it is not the same woman in the photo, but he marries her anyway. Filmed in southern France and Réunion island,Mississippi Mermaid was the 17th highest-grossing film of the year in France with a total of 1,221,027 admissions. It was remade in 2001 as Original Sin, directed by Michael Cristofer and starring Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas.
Louis Mahé (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a wealthy tobacco plantation owner on Réunion island in the Indian Ocean, is awaiting the arrival of his bride to be, Julie Roussel (Catherine Deneuve), whom he has never met. They became acquainted through the personals column of a French newspaper and have been corresponding by mail. At the Hotel Mascarin he meets his partner Jardine who accompanies him to pick up the ring. Louis drives to the dock to greet Julie who is arriving on the steamer Mississipi (spelled with one p according to the French spelling of the river at the time) from Nouméa, the capital of New Caledonia. When they meet he is surprised by her beauty and does not recognize her; she is not the woman in the photo that she had sent him. She explains that she sent the photo of a neighbor to assure the sincerity of his intentions. He confesses that he too has not told the complete truth, having hidden the fact that he was wealthy.
Louis and Julie quickly marry, and his adoration of his new bride makes him overlook inconsistencies with what she wrote in her letters. He gives Julie access to his bank accounts and prints her image on the cigarette packs his company manufactures. After receiving an angry letter from Julie's sister, Berthe Roussel (Nelly Borgeaud), demanding to know the whereabouts of Julie, Louis returns home to find that Julie is gone, and that she has absconded with nearly 28 million francs, all but emptying his bank accounts. Soon after, Julie's sister Berthe arrives and informs him that the woman he married was not Julie and that she saw her sister board the Mississipi. They hire a private detective, Comolli, to track down the impostor and bring her to justice.
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Wikipedia