François Truffaut: The Lost Secret

7. Marriages: Mississippi Mermaid (1969), Bed and Board (1970)

189 At the time when Bed and Board was released, Truffaut made the following observation: I class myself among the group of directors for whom cinema is an extension of youth, who, just like children who have been sent to play in a corner and remake the world with toys, continue to play as adults by making films. This is what I call “cinema from the room at the back,” involving a refusal to accept life as it is, or the world in its real state and, in reaction, an acceptance of the need to re-create something that has a bit of the quality of fairy stories about it, rather like the American cinema that made us dream when we were young.1 This declaration, while it applies to all his works, reflects more than anything else the degree to which Truffaut remained distanced from his own times during the years following May 1968. Mississippi Mermaid and Bed and Board are both characterized by unreality. Removed from ideological commitments, Truffaut cultivated the style of the masters. In the first of these movies, he adopts the formula of a melodrama that combines the influences of Renoir and Hitchcock, and in the second one, those of Lubitsch’s comedies seasoned with a dash of Guitry. Being the works of a cinephile that were aimed at a mass audience, these films were not very successful when they were released. Nevertheless, their experimental nature does not mean that they are devoid of emotion. The sincerity of the representation of love in Mississippi Mermaid, and a degreeofawkwardnessinthehandlingofcertainaspectsofitsstructure, turn it into what one could describe as “a little sick film” that appeals to those who love Truffaut’s works. The power of the film derives from its melodic line, from the continuity of its interior vision, which follows the courseofametaphoricaljourneythatisnotspatiallyinterrupted.InconMarriages Mississippi Mermaid (1969) Bed and Board (1970) 190 François Truffaut: The Lost Secret trast, Bed and Board, a static film that centers on an apartment building, exploitsdiscontinuity.Gags,improvisation,andwordplayareuppermost in a story in which the scene forms the narrative unit. Although one is a film-river and the other is a film-mosaic, these two works both have as their subject the early stages of the life of a married couple, describing the pitfalls that threaten its precarious harmony. Both end on a note that is full of ambiguity. But their deep subject remains the eternal dialectic between solitude and intimacy, which is at the very heart of the experience of the spectator who is watching cinema. Mississippi Mermaid (1969) The original screenplay of Mississippi Mermaid includes a scene in which the hero, Louis Mahé (Jean-Paul Belmondo), goes to buy stockings for Marion (Catherine Deneuve), the woman he loves. Truffaut had already shot this scene in two other films, Shoot the Piano Player and The Soft Skin, in which Léna and Nicole ask their lover to get them a pair of stockings . The scene takes place in a shop: “There are saleswomen, and seeing this man buy stockings makes them smile, and there it is. It was a scene about nothing at all, but it was difficult to do.”2 Truffaut had cut this scene from the two earlier films because on each occasion he considered that it had been muffed. The reason he invested these images with such importance that no representation of them could ever satisfy him is because they sum up, in condensed form, the dilemma of the characters : that is to say, the impossibility of socializing desire. To buy stockings , in the imaginary of Truffaut’s oeuvre, is to lay claim publicly–but the audience here is composed exclusively of women–to ownership of the female body. Charlie Kohler, like Pierre Lachenay, is incapable of it. Louis Mahé is their brother. His story is going to illuminate the other side of these tormented personalities. At first sight, he does not appear to show the slightest signs of dissociation. He consistently follows the impulses arising from his inner being, and his words and actions reflect these throughout the story. Nevertheless, as Winnicott notes, “the healthy person’s inner world is related to the outer or actual world and reality and yet is personal and capable of an aliveness of its own.”3 This harmony between the inner and outer worlds is missing in Louis, just as Marriages 191 itislackinginthepianist,orLachenay.Thelinkbridgingthetwospheres of experience is broken...