Mississippi Mermaid — Irene Bakola

La Sirène du Mississipi

Every text, Barthes tells us, encompasses a polarity: that which is written and that which can only be read. There lies in every creation a ‘readerly’ dimension that opposes and complements the ‘writerly.’ Reading then, becomes a form of labour: ‘my task is to move, to shift systems whose perspective ends neither at the text nor at the “I.” This is how we situate La Sirène du Mississipi: as a labour of cinematic reading. Rooting himself on the 1947 Woolrich novel, Waltz into Darkness, and the essence of Renoir and Hitchcock’s cinema, Truffaut names, un-names and re-names the clashing text of a noir romance. With ‘Truffaut, the film critic’ at work here, framing intertextuality, it is through a reading and not a writing process that such a film is de/constructed. And such an allegory must take place where Nouvelle Vague authorial sensibilities intersect with Classical Hollywood archetypes. To couple such structures is not to negate their original importance, but to reaffirm their inherent pluralism. It is to to pluck them out of their genre-bound environment, away from a singular meaning, and towards a new course of ‘becoming.’ Finite mythologies rendered infinite by being exposed to verisimilitude—a place in which they were never meant to exist.

We shall accept then Barthes’ last principle, that of re-reading as a multiplying quality that pulls the text out of its internal chronology to recapture a mythic time. How are we, for example, to read the siren decontextualised and bare in a state of post-characterisation? There is no first reading and to presume its existence is to build our case on operations of artifice and suspense. Parthenogenesis is an illusion but rereading is ‘that play which is the return of the different.’ In this case, Deneuve’s Julie/Marion ‘returns’ on screen like an apparition awaiting just outside the frame to greet Belmondo’s Louis. For it is not the siren presented here, but the metonymy of noir at its most perverse, ethereal and opaque. Marion is indeed an intoxicating ellipsis of a person, one projected on tv screens, reflected on mirrors, reproduced in photos and cigarette packets. A summoning from the cinematic imaginary, she is sentient only in the ways her genre of birth allows her to be, and this felt incapacity for growth makes her suffer in the unfamiliar romantic landscape. This is equally true for Louis, whose hopeful romanticism bends into masochism when faced with Marion’s poisonous archetype. Reportedly, Belmondo felt deeply uncomfortable in Louis’ shoes, but that palpable awkwardness is precisely what elevates his performance. These two figures, frigidly archetypical and yet painfully real, desperately roam the film’s locales like wild animals in captivity, miles away from home.

This is perhaps another reason behind the continuous traversing of borders that both characters compulsively engage in: first sunlit Réunion with its lush vegetation, then seaside Antibes and its decaying nightclubs, a country house in Aix-en-Provence, a hotel room in Lyon, a snowed-in cabin near the Swiss mountains. A succession of static landscapes, as a ceaseless ‘passage,’ away from and towards. Breathlessly, away from the tragic loneliness of personal columns and a fear of the dark, and aimlessly towards the obsessive decorum of one’s fate. Intention void of meaning; unbuttoning what the other can re-button, recording declarations of love only for them to shatter under the wheels of a passing car, constantly shifting between ‘vous’ and ‘tu’. And finally: ‘Je t’aime Louis. Peut-être que tu ne me croies pas, mais il y a des choses incroyables qui sont vraies.’

Indeed, genre is negotiated and traversed just as often. An exotic romance tugged northward into crime territory, dragged through pools of melodrama, and drowned into a sea of citations. Certified Copy comes to mind, another film about a couple wandering, undressing only to dress up again into a different guise, pulling and pulling until the film tears in half and all gaze is left suspended. It is the lovers driving the cadence in both films, even if in Kiarostami’s landscape it is a temporal rather than a tonal transaction that takes place. And in this cinema of ‘becoming’ Nikolaidis’ noir reimagining also resides. Both Singapore Sling and See You in Hell’s trios have been discarded in the noir after-life of repetition. That La Sirène converses with sources beyond those Truffaut himself cites, is not due to the writerly but the readerly unfurling in those expanding scopes. And since the film has taught us to read it as an approximation, we search for these openings in our own systems of reference.

Distance and closeness oscillate between a virginal ‘vous’ and violent myths two lovers hold of one another. Medea and Theseus, Odysseus and a siren he carried off away from home (considering sirens more closely resemble canaries than mermaids), crashing against the shore of ‘becoming.’ They will always fail, though not for a lack of dreaming, and so they shall wither, each of them poisoning the other. It does not end in re-birth, after all this isn’t the first time the two have crossed a border, but an enduring negotiation between genre citations and incarnations of the self. Between reading the infinite narrative and re-reading its transcendence into a snowy landscape of indecisiveness.

Last Update: September 2024