Mississippi Mermaid movie storyline. In Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, the owner of a cigarette factory Louis Mahé is engaged through correspondence with Julie Roussel and he does not know her. When Julie arrives in the island to get married with Louis, he waits for her in the docks but Louis does not recognize Julie in the passenger vessel and finds that she is totally different from the picture she had sent to Louis. They get married and Louis shares his bank accounts with her.
When Julie’s sister writes a letter to Louis asking her sister to write to her, Louis discovers that the woman is not Julie who is missing. Further, he finds that the woman has cleared his bank accounts and left the island. Louis and Julie’s sister hire an efficient private detective Comolli and Louis travels to France seeking the woman, but he has a nervous breakdown in Nice and is submitted to an intense sleeping therapy in a clinic.
He recovers and finds that the woman, actually Marion Vergano, works in the Phoenix Club Privé in Antibes and lives in the low-budget Monorail Hotel. Louis breaks in her room and when she arrives from the club, she tells that she was happy with him but her former dangerous lover Richard had blackmailed her. Louis is still in love with Marion and escapes with her to the countryside. But Comolli is chasing Marion in France accused of murdering Julie.
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.
About the Story
Louis Mahé (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a wealthy tobacco plantation owner on Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean, awaits 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. At the Hotel Mascarin, he meets his business 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 ensure his sincerity. He confesses that he too has not told the complete truth, having hidden that he was wealthy.
They quickly marry, and his adoration makes him overlook inconsistencies between her comments and 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 Julie’s whereabouts, Louis returns home to find that Julie has gone with nearly 28 million francs, all but emptying his bank accounts. Soon after, Berthe arrives and informs him that his wife was not Julie and that she saw her sister board the Mississipi. They hire a private detective, Comolli, to track down the impostor.
On a flight to Nice, France, Louis collapses from exhaustion. While recuperating in the Clinique Heurtebise sanitarium, he sees Julie(‘s impostor) on television, dancing at a nightclub in Antibes. He buys a gun and travels to Antibes where he breaks into her room at the Hotel Monorail, intent on killing her. When she returns and is confronted by Louis, she offers no resistance.
Explaining that her real name is Marion Vergano, she tells him of her sordid past; of her years in prison and association with a heartless gangster, Richard, who was with her on the Mississipi. She recounts that when they met Julie Roussel and learned of her forthcoming marriage, Richard fabricated a plot to kill Julie and send Marion in her place to rob Louis. Afterwards Richard forced her to go through with the robbery and then abandoned her. She tells Louis that she loves him, and Louis forgives her.
They buy a convertible and drive to Aix-en-Provence, where they move into a house and spend their days traveling the region and making love. Their happiness is interrupted by Comolli, who has arrived in Aix on the trail of the impostor. After failing to bribe the detective to drop the case, Louis shoots him dead and buries him in the wine cellar. Louis and Marion flee to Lyon, but she grows dissatisfied with their fugitive existence and longs for a life of luxury in Paris. Louis returns briefly to Réunion and sells his share in the plantation to his partner, Jardine. Upon his return he finds the police on their trail. Again they are forced to flee, leaving most of his money behind.
Mississippi Mermaid (1969)
Directed by: François Truffaut
Starring: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Catherine Deneuve, Michel Bouquet, Nelly Borgeaud, Marcel Berbert, Martine Ferrière, Yves Drouhet, Roland Thénot
Screenplay by: François Truffaut
Production Design by: Claude Pignot
Cinematography by: Denys Clerval
Film Editing by: Agnès Guillemot
Set Decoration by: Claude Pignot
Makeup Department: Jean-Pierre Eychenne
Music by: Antoine Duhamel
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: United Artists
Release Date: June 18, 1969 (France), April 10, 1970 (United States)
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