Mississippi Mermaid (La sirène du Mississipi)

Beauty is by no means rare on the lush, tropical Isle de Reunion. Yet when island resident and tobacco tycoon Louis Mahe (Jean Paul Belmondo) first meets Julie Rouselle (Catherine Deneuve), his mail-order fiancée, he’s completely enraptured by her radiance. But it soon becomes clear that Julie is hiding a dark secret. And when she disappears without a trace, Louis vows to stop at nothing to find her, a resolution that lures him into a tangled web of relentless obsession, uncontrollable passion, and ultimately cold-blooded murder.

The Boston Globe’s Ty Burr describes “Mississippi Mermaid” as “a film noir shot in dazzling color, a Hitchcock movie with the soul of a Jean Renoir drama. The latter is this movie’s dedicatee, and his humane vision of the animal that is man is very much in evidence. Yet all we see for a while are Hitch and crime novelist Cornell Woolrich, whose 1947 ‘Waltz Into Darkness’ serves as the film’s source.”