Mississippi Mermaid

Truffaut's second Cornell Woolrich adaptation, made with the two biggest stars in France — Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve — and a budget to match. It was a commercial disappointment and was cut for its American release, which did not help. Restored, it is one of the more interesting failures in French cinema.

Louis Mahé runs a tobacco factory on Réunion and has arranged a marriage by correspondence. The woman who arrives looks nothing like the photograph; she explains this smoothly; he is delighted with her anyway. What follows moves from the Indian Ocean to Antibes to the snow of the Alps and keeps changing genre as it goes — colonial melodrama, then a study of a man who has decided not to know things, then a fugitive romance. Denys Clerval shot it in warm colour and Antoine Duhamel scored it; Truffaut dedicated the film to Jean Renoir.

Its problem, at the time, was that audiences wanted Belmondo and Deneuve to behave like Belmondo and Deneuve, and Truffaut was interested in something else: a man in the grip of a passion that requires his own active collaboration in being deceived. Later critics — and the film's admirers include a number of directors who remade or borrowed from it — have found the perversity of that far more compelling than 1969 did.