Park Chan-wook's "Decision to Leave" at SIFF Cinema & Northwest Film Forum: Oct 21 - Nov 10 & Oct 28 - Nov 23

A return to form was seen in Park Chan-wook's 2016 resetting of "Fingersmith" by Welsh writer Sarah Waters. In his hands the director of international breakout hits like "Old Boy" distorted and warped the text into his own "The Handmaiden" through numerous perspectival shifts, abundant voyeurism, and academic eroticism. Often told in the form of theatrical readings of Shunga illustrated erotica, "Park Chan-wook Returns with an Erotic Romance, Con-artist Story and Period Piece". The film's further assimilation from the vocabulary of the thriller and it's suspense built from an atmosphere of rich and erotic textures, found the director even more firmly in Hitchcock territory than usual, as discussed at length in interview with FilmStage, "Park Chan-wook Talks ‘The Handmaiden,’ Male Gaze and Queer Influence". Similarly, this year's Cannes award-winning film from the director unabashedly delves into crime thriller territory, with more than a slight resemblance in its uneven terrain and abundant twists, to Aflred Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece. Yet "Decision to Leave" at SIFF Cinema and Northwest Film Forum this month and on Mubi this coming winter, distinguishes itself as Park's own particular brand of 21st century romantic thriller. All the while, "Park Chan-wook’s Thrilling Mystery is Noir at its Most Nourishing", offering richly satisfying points of genre reference making for a modern work within an established form. But in this case, it's precisely the protagonist detective, Hae-joon's investigative skills, matched and mirrored by Park Chan-wook and his co-writer, Chung Seo-kyung, that result in the whole of the perspective being thrown off balance. Park Hai-il captures the steady unraveling of Hae-joon, and the viewer's perspective, with an intimacy that's all the more remarkable for being concealed behind a curt, efficient veneer. The personal and professional begin to blur as Hae-joon stakes out the home of murder suspect, Seo-rae, in an invasion of privacy that she amusedly acknowledges and even, in a sense, enticingly welcomes. And it is Seo-rae, as portrayed by Tang Wei, is the pivot around which the whole mystery turns, "Decision to Leave: Tang Wei Stuns in Park Chan-wook Black-widow Noir". If thoughts turn again to Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo", these associations aren't misplaced. through a number of elaborately staged scenes, the director unleashes a tide of associations and allusions to that particular psychological thriller; a surveillance subject that becomes a desire subject, a noir romantic template that resets and returns to itself halfway through, and in "Vertigo's" opening, a fall from a great height being central to both stories. Park Chan-wook has shown himself to have a flair for grandiose, and sometimes indulgent, stylistic flourishes, but here he has seized upon Hitchcock's aesthetics of voyeurism and obsession, and utilized these inclinations to better serve our journey through "Decision to Leave's Labyrinth of Desire".

All Monsters Attack at The Grand Illusion Cinema: Oct 7 - Nov 3

To my mind, the months of October and November could always do with more in the way of programming around Halloween season genre film and its disorienting frights, crepuscular surrealism, and discomfiting atmospheres. Thankfully, Scarecrow Video annually steps up with their curated Halloween section of domestic and international horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and psychotronic selections. The Psychotronic Challenge also returns in its seventh installment, challenging viewers to select a new theme category for every day in October from the deep trivia of the cues on offer. While we're here, let's talk the incomparable one-of-a-kind resource that is Scarecrow, and how if you live in the Northwest and are a fan of cinema, it's essentially your personal obligation to ensure their doors stay open for business. For horror and genre aficionados, there is no other resource in North America like that offered by Scarecrow Video and their abundant catalog of obscure, foreign releases, out of print, and ultra-rare editions, and with nearly 150,000 films on offer, no singular online streaming resource can compare. In previous years, the annual citywide cinematic offerings for the months of October and November have seen a great set of films exploring desolate worlds, classic Japanese horror, a vampiric romaticism double feature and a night of music from a maestro of Italian horror. Also in the way of recent Halloween seasons of note, the local arthouse cinemas presented an abundance on the theme of the haunted house in 2015, and 2013 saw no small number of invaders from beyond. 2017 was heavy on 1970s psychedelic and psychological horror from Europe, particularly from the era of abundance seen in the subgenres of French Fantastique and Italian Giallo. 2018's programming was highly attuned to American 1980s horror, as was the case with the 2019 installment, alongside a bold mix of decades of classic European, Asian, and Italian genre material. Making a return after the long pandemic hiatus, 2021 also diversified with a strong set of films that never saw a theatrical release during the 2020 season.

One of the longest running, and most consistently satisfying of the local Halloween series has been The Grand Illusion Cinema's month-long All Monsters Attack calendar of horror, creature features, classic thrillers, sci-fi, and cult cinema. A highlight from last year's programming returns with a memorial night for Seattle's most dedicated cinephile, music lover, and man-about-town, William Kennedy. Before his passing in 2021, Bill wished for nothing more than his friends and cultural compatriots to join together for a screening of David Cronenberg's classic body-horror techno thriller, “Videodrome”. Two slices of celluloid magic from the black and white era are on the slate for the first week of programming, James Laughton's dreamily peculiar showcase for Robert Mitchum's malevolent preacher in "Night of the Hunter", and the slasher that birthed the genre, Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" in an extended cut. Switching modes to 1980s fare, there's Frank Henenlotter's absurd and excessive, "Brain Damage", and what might contestably be the greatest horror film of the decade, John Carpenter's audacious remake of "The Thing" from Another World. 1980s blockbuster fare can be seen in John McTiernan's Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, "Predator", and emerging from the Japanese cinema explosion of the 1990s, "Versus" put Ryûhei Kitamura on the map. A trio of diverse vampiric features are next on the slate; Francis Ford Coppola's slick and operatic 1990s hit "Bram Stoker's Dracula", the weighty atmosphere of F.W. Murnau's silent era "Nosferatu", and the sole directorial effort from child actor James Bond III, "Def by Temptation" which shares rarified company with films like Bill Gunn's single horror entry. Two long-running series at The Grand Illusion return with a VHS Über Alles double feature promising a night of Student Slasher Thrillrides from the Scarecrow archive only released on VHS, and The Sprocket Society present their usual array of rarities on 16mm. This year screening 1932's infamous "Freaks" by Tod Browning, alongside a secret pre-code shocker second feature, and a set of spooky shorts and cartoons. No Halloween season would be complete without a SATANAGEDDON! double feature presenting two ultra-rare 16mm slices of Satanic Panic-era madness. And rounding off the season, Italian horror and Giallo are essential components to the genre, and few have produced more entries in both than Lucio Fulci. Memorable for the tropical island setting of his "Zombie", also known as "Zombi 2", the film pairs the director with longtime collaborator Fabio Frizzi. In recent years the composer has toured his extended body of music made for the films of Fulci, particularly "The Beyond: Composer's Cut", which features Frizzi’s expanded score for the film, presented here in a new 4K restoration.

Seattle Cinerama’s Sound & Vision, Summer Rewind and 70mm Film Festivals: Aug 17 - Sept 20

Stepping up to fill the void left in the wake of Cinerama's now extinct Science Fiction Film Festival, Paul Allen's state of the art theater with its Cinerama-Scope screen, Dolby Atmos sound and laser projection system, will host a trio of festivals over the course of August and September. A standard for the cinema, one of the only remaining Cinerama screens in North America, the third of the festival series will be presented on 70mm. Notably, the format showcase will feature the most recent de-restoration work on Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, in a new print cut from an exacting analog reconstruction. Seattle Cinerama's three mini festivals begin with a second run series, Summer Rewind, consisting of a week of blockbusters and genre films that premiered over the course of this past year. In stoke of brilliant curatorial work, the second of the series will feature conceptual double bills of works significant for their synergy of image and music. Taking it's theme literally and conceptually, Sound & Vision draws from both heightened audiovisual works of sensorial fiction like Ridley Scott's dystopic neonoir franchise, as it does from Jonathan Demme and Nicolas Roeg's placement of musical stars at the film's locus. The thrill of classic soundtracks meeting with genre films can be seen in Tim Burton's work with Prince, and Steven Spielberg's earliest megahits with John Williams. Contemporary audiovisual spectacles represented in the series by the dreamworlds of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, and the galactic exploration of Christopher Nolan, Hans Zimmer, Denis Villeneuve and Jóhann Jóhannsson. Blade Runner / Blade Runner 2049 • Logan / Mad Max: Fury Road • Wall-E / Interstellar • Blue Velvet / Mulholland Drive • Batman / Purple Rain • Pina 3D / Samsara • Total Recall / Terminator 2 • There Will Be Blood / No Country For Old Men • Close Encounters Of The Third Kind 4K / Jaws 4K • The Matrix 4K / The Fifth Element 4K • Gravity 3D / Arrival • Stop Making Sense / The Man Who Fell To Earth •

The third of the series being a format specific 70mm Film Festival showcasing the benefits inherent in the resolution, scale and luminosity of the 70mm celluloid format and three-strip films. Any effort to present these works is limited globally to the handful of theaters with the hardware to properly screen them, and a sparsity of films shot, cut or released on the format. Crowning the 70mm series is the newest in a line of Stanley Kubrick restorations, a project heralded by the celluloid champion and director of contemporary action and science fiction films, Christopher Nolan. The project initiated decades before through a meeting with Ned Price, the vice president of restoration at Warner Brothers during the 1999 project of Price and his team creating a preservation interpositive from the 20 reels of the original negative. Price offered to Nolan to see the copies made of the original prints, and intrigued by what he saw, Nolan approached the studio about continuing the work to the end of recreating the 1968 celluloid theatrical release. As detailed in Variety's "Going the Analog Route to Preserve Celluloid Beauty of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey'", the team at the FotoKem laboratory in Burbank then delivered the fruits to Nolan and Price of a six month process of cleaning the negative, checking and repairing splices, and removing previous imperfect work. Then they made an answer print, color-timed it by closely adhering to the original timing notes and documentation, and finally made an interpositive and an internegative for striking 70mm prints.

The team also approached the audio content with a similarly strict adherence, restoring the original six track soundtrack and adjusting levels to their original particulars, this was then exactingly transferred to the new prints. “The film is mixed in a very extreme way,” says Nolan, “There are incredible sonic peaks that are beyond anything anyone would do today.” More insight into the complexities of this process offered in New York Times' interview with the director, "Christopher Nolan’s Version of Vinyl: Unrestoring ‘2001’". As Stanley Kubrick’s monolithic adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's novel has been born (yet again) for the big screen, The Guardian assembled a set of directors, special effects moguls and those who worked on the film to discuss it's legacy, "50 Years of 2001: A Space Odyssey – How Kubrick's Sci-Fi Changed the Very Form of Cinema". Consider the film's far-reaching exploration of human possibilities and the precariousness of life in a seemingly infinite and indifferent universe, all realized through its singular and groundbreaking production, "2001: A Space Odyssey is Still the ‘Ultimate Trip’". From the sparsity of films available on the 70mm format, Cinerama has assembled a broad genre inclusive array of everything from documentaries to cinema classics by Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, and Alfred Hitchcock, to pop culture, action and special effects hits in their two week series.  Tron • 2001: A Space Odyssey • Back to the Future Part II  • Vertigo • The Sound of Music • Lawrence of Arabia • Baraka • Phantom Thread • E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial • Howard the Duck • Top Gun • Ghostbusters • Dunkirk • Days of Thunder • Wonder Woman • Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country • It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World •

Noir City Festival: Film Noir from A to B at SIFF Cinema: Feb 16 - 22

Eddie Muller and the Film Noir Foundation are back in Seattle following last year's Noir City: The Big Knockover - Heists, Holdups and Schemes Gone Awry and the festival's return to the city in 2016, after their brief hiatus in 2015. The 16th iteration, Noir City 2018: Film Noir from A to B double bill format presents 9 "A" and "B" double bills, spanning the breadth of the original Film Noir era, 1941 to 1953. The total of 18 classic noirs are presented as a pairing a top tier studio "A" with a shorter, low budget "B" film second feature. All but one of the films in this year's Noir City will be screened on celluloid, many these bold 35mm prints courtesy of their collaborative efforts with The UCLA Film & Television Archive. The work of UCLA's Preservation Society and their annual touring Festival of Preservation offering one of the country's most, "Fascinating Windows into Our Cinematic Past". The work of the restorationists at the archive feature prominently in the LA Weekly's discussion of the expansive shift to digital distribution and projection nationwide, "Movie Studios are Forcing Hollywood to Abandon 35mm Film. But the Consequences of Going Digital are Vast, and Troubling". In a notable year for The Film Noir Foundation, Muller took up permanent residence on TCM with a new programming franchise hosted by the Czar of Noir with the launch of his Sunday morning Noir Alley showcase. The platform allowing for wider exposure beyond the festival format, exploring the genre from every angle as he introduces a different noir classic each week. As a childhood devotee of Silver Age comics and the art of Jim Steranko, 2017 also saw Muller in a dream role on the printed page, further enshrining, "Noir Alley in the Pages of DC Comics". Arriving in Hollywood from across the sea, French director Julien Duvivier escaped the war at home by bringing his incredible style to offbeat studio films of the early '40s, exemplified by this anthology of supernatural tales. With a solid cast including Edward G. Robinson, Barbara Stanwyck, Charles Boyer, Robert Cummings and Thomas Mitchel, "Flesh and Fantasy" watches as a legitimate prototype to Serling's "The Twilight Zone". Included here, "Destiny" was intended as the opening segment of the anthology, on it's strength Universal Studio cleaved off and released it the film as a 65 minute stand-alone feature. Brought together for the night, Noir City presents the four chapters of Duvivier's work in a rare screening as one complete program.

Other highlights from this year's festival program include Alfred Hitchcock's 1943 observation on the susceptibility of American small town life to the encroachment of a malevolent evil. Anchored by Joseph Cotten's mesmerizing performance, "Shadow of a Doubt" may be the director's ultimate expression of the ease with which a horror infects the banal simplicity of everyday life. In another rarity, never released on home video and long thought lost, "I Walk Alone" features Burt Lancaster as a Prohibition-era bootlegger who gets out of prison to find that his former partner is enjoying the spoils of their criminal enterprise. Revived in a new digital restoration courtesy of Paramount Pictures, can the torch singer between the two men, played by Lizabeth Scott, keep Kirk Douglas and Lancaster from their imminent and deadly feud?  Also presented in a new 35mm restoration courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, Felix E. Feist's "The Man Who Cheated Himself", observes a veteran San Francisco homicide cop as he spirals into a moral morass when his married socialite lover "inadvertently" bumps off her husband. Utilizing its San Francisco locations to maximum impact, including a memorable climax at Fort Point, Feist spins a classic thriller in the James M. Cain mold. The only original screenplay penned by the legendary detective story writer Raymond Chandler, "The Blue Dahlia", made for the most famous pairing of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, and a massive hit for Paramount, and in another Chandler vehicle, Howard Hawks sets up Humphrey Bogart to spar with Lauren Bacall, in one of the greatest lead parings ever to grace the screen. Infamously circuitous and twisting, "The Big Sleep" still takes significant unknotting, even when tackled by the astute and expertise of Roger Ebert in his Great Movies column. Other classic noir sourced of literary material, Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade character, perfectly portrayed by Humphrey Bogart, makes for pure gold in this search first for a missing person, and then for it's titular, "Maltese Falcon". A highlight of its director's filmography, Michael Curtiz' "Mildred Pierce", is a vehicle for the ferocious and career defining role from Joan Crawford as a hard-working housewife caught in monetary troubles as a consequence of a blackmail plot involving her daughter. Generational work ethic, class, entitlement and privilege are explored in this James M. Cain adaptation to even greater success than Todd Haines quality effort of 2011.

László Nemes new film "Son of Saul" at Landmark Theatres: Jan 22 - Mar 3

Given high praise by The Guardian as the number one film screened in the United States last year, László Nemes has created in his award-winning, unlikely directorial debut, "'Son of Saul', an Expansion of the Language of Holocaust Films". Understandably even the century's most confident filmmakers quail before the terrifying responsibility of massacre, torture and sadism that is the Holocaust. Only documentaries have successfully addressed the immensity of the subject, namely Alain Resnais haunting "Night and Fog" the plumbing of the personal in Claude Lanzmann's monumental achievement "Shoah", and the unseen revelation that is Alfred Hitchcock's recently reconstructed "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey". The latter recently detailed in HBO's "Night Will Fall", this is a "Recalling of a Film From the Liberation of the Camps" that features some of the most unflinching footage dedicated to film in the whole of the 20th Century. Few have ever gotten as close to the three works mentioned above to penetrating the mysteries of this most cataclysmic of human horrors. Neme's film, "Son of Saul" approaches the untouchable by taking the viewer into the close-viewed final chapter of it's protagonist's life as a Sonderkommando in a unnamed concentration camp. This is a raw, pitiless cinema that pulls no punches, and does the "unrepresentable" in it's filmic fictionalization of human dignity amid the torrent of the Holocaust.

In his "Atrocity Exhibitionism" for Film Comment, Stefan Grissemann details why "Son of Saul" is an opportunistic and highly problematic work. How in making a Holocaust drama a renewed exciting and vital storytelling experience, Nemes courts the dangers of fashioning a provocative vision of entertainment. Conversely in the same Cannes 2015 Roundtable, Jonathan Romney opens his review establishing the "Dead Man Walking" of Nemes’ troubling film conveys the Holocaust’s full horror by keeping it out of focus. More significant than their appraisal of the film, "Shoah" and "Last of the Unjust" documentarist Claude Lanzmann, famous for his disapproval of dramatic representations of the Holocaust on screen, and even well-meaning and educational entertainment's "Threat to the Incarnation of the Truth" surprised everyone by praising Neme's film, calling it the “anti–Schindler’s List”. Lanzmann specifically commended the film’s focus. Rather than presuming to evoke the Holocaust in broad strokes, Nemes concentrates on the experience of one man, a Hungarian Jew named Saul interned in an unspecified concentration camp. As a Sonderkommando, his work is a form of complicity pressed into the service of murder, that did not ensure its members’ survival: the Sonderkommando were destined to be rapidly killed in their turn. It is our vantage into this most untenable of horrors that sets Nemes' film apart from contemporary Holocaust drama, to quote from Jonathan Romney's Film Comment review; "Son of Saul is neither melodramatic nor mundanely centered on redemption, par excellence a theme devalued by cinema. Nemes’s film is, most immediately, about what we do and don’t see, what can and can’t be shown."

Claude Lanzmann himself resurfacing in 2013 with the release of his extended interviews with the last living Ältester of the Judenrat in his belated documentary, shot in the 1970s in Rome and not completed until present day about the divisive Holocaust survivor, Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein. In this documentary Lanzmann has gifted the world a "Fascinating, Subtle Study in Survivor Non-Guilt" and "A Remarkable Companion to the Document of 'Shoah'". But rather than simply shaping the existing footage, Lanzmann returned to Theresienstadt and to Vienna, where the camera follows him into courtyards that once housed gallows and still-empty synagogues. This where the new film diverges dramatically it's predecessor; Lanzmann is as much a presence as Rabbi Murmelstein. "Last of the Unjust" watches as complex and discomfiting reflection on one man's role in the supposedly comfortable arrangement that was part of the pantomime of ostensible good faith after the Anschluss. The Nazis coerced leading Jews to be their administrative elders, or Ältester, a queasy use of Judeophobe-propagandist terminology, of which Murmelstein is the last surviving member. In response to interpretations of the documentary's objectives, Stephen Smith of the Shoah Foundation disputes the idea that Lanzmann is an apologist for Rabbi Murmelstein; “This was Lanzmann giving him a chance to clear his name, but one must not understate the complexity,” he said. “He’s good at discerning and getting to the bottom of the complexity of the Holocaust. It may not be desirable to everyone’s view, but I think it’s one we need to see and to grapple with."

Kent Jones' new documentary "Hitchcock/Truffaut" at Grand Illusion Cinema: Jan 29 - Feb 11 | Claire Denis' "Chocolat" & Philippe Garrel's "In the Shadow of Women" at Northwest Film Forum: Feb 12 - 14

Northwest Film Forum's annual Coeur Sans Coeur: French Films for Valentines Weekend this year brings Philippe Garrel's "In the Shadow of Women" and Claire Denis "Chocolat". Philippe Garrel's previous feature, "Jealousy" stood as a highlight of SIFF 2014 and topped Film Comment's 20 Best Undistributed Films of that year. Detailed in the wide-ranging, Philippe Garrel in Conversation for Mubi during his first North American visit in decades, Garrel is revealed to be literally a child of French cinema. His father was the actor Maurice Garrel, his second home was said to be at the Cinémathèque Française, he shot the first movie of his own at the age of 16 and he's known for having ridden through the streets of Paris with Godard shooting newsreels of Paris, May 1968. His career has established his intimate, handcrafted cinema as fundamentally close to the mechanics of silent film -- the unadorned beauty of faces, figures, hands, rooms and light -- and revisited the same deeply personal themes of loss, mourning, and revitalization of purpose through love. Another feature of his pedigree can be seen in the wonderfully sharp and vigorously cinematic the black and white filming by Willy Kurant, (the cinematographer for Godard's, "Masculin Feminin") who lends Garrel's subjects the expressive vitality and immediacy of a daily life lived.

Thematically variegated, from strange science and libido monstrosities run amok, to male camaraderie in the French Foreign Legion, to post-Colonial aftermath in both Africa and at home in modern day Paris, Claire Denis' filmography navigates the spaces between traditional narrative and more structurally adventurous cinema. At times not quite hitting the balance between these two forms, evident in 2005's "The Intruder", she more consistently fashions an interplay of these two gravitational pulls. Recent successes can be seen in 2008's near-masterpiece on class, race, urban life, light and motion that was "35 Shots of Rum" and 2014's pitch perfect neo-Noir, "Bastards". The latter bringing it's audience deep into the nightmare of one family's decomposition from the inside with it's contact with power, corruption and an immoral elite. In a sense all of her work can be seen as, "Family Films of a Very Different Sort". Another constant of her work, one that she shares with the best of her peers, (think David Lynch, Steve McQueen, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang) is the elliptical nature of it's narrative and visual structure. Looping back on itself, projecting ahead, fusing impression, experience and dream, these structural and thematic signatures are abundantly detailed in Nick Pinkerton's Claire Denis interview for Film Comment and Senses of Cinema's "Dancing Reveals So Much: An Interview with Claire Denis".



This month Grand Illusion Cinema features Kent Jones archive-plumbing, "Hitchcock/Truffaut" which watches not unlike a enthused installment of, "At the Movies With François and Hitch". In his interview for Film Comment Kent Jones examines the legendary interview between the two directors and the varied influence of "The Master of Suspense". The design of Jones' documentary essay pivots around what came to be known as “one of the most revealing and engrossing books on film art, technique and history ever put together”, upon it's English translation in 1967, which was born of a week of interviews conducted in 1962 at Universal Studios by the two directors along with translator, Helen G. Scott. In the French magazine Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s, Truffaut had been one of the original proponents of the auteur theory, the notion that the director is the artist of a film. In "Solidarity of Cinema" for Roger Ebert, Kent Jones establishes that, “Truffaut wanted to correct the bias against Hitchcock in the United States, but then on the other hand, he was also trying to amend what he thought was the tendency toward abstraction in Cahiers criticism.” Truffaut was interested in larger issues like how artists managed to work within the studio system, and in specifics like film craft. In both the book and the documentary, the two directors amply discuss technique. Yet for a book so rich with shoptalk, “Hitchcock/Truffaut” has, for nearly half a century, also retained its reputation as a witty, breezy read, a canonical text for anyone interested in movies.

Elucidating the parallels of their cinema, The Grand Illusion will also be screening 35mm prints of two repertory works. Alfred Hitchcock's post-War espionage thriller starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, "Notorious" marked a watershed for Hitchcock artistically, and represents a heightened thematic maturity, featuring what Roger Ebert called in his Great Movies; "some of the most effective cinematography in his—or anyone's—work". With an abundance of mirroring scenario, technical and stylistic gestures, François Truffaut's "Mississippi Mermaid" watches as a curious homage and observation on the Hitchcock-ian themes of misplaced identity, obsession and mirroring realities. An adaptation of "Waltz into Darkness" by Cornell Woolrich, Truffaut spins a haunting island Noir starring Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo, framed by the post-Colonial setting of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. While not highly regarded upon it's release in 1969, it was still recognized as a compelling exploration of the director's "fascination with loneliness and love, which comprise, of course, a different kind of mystery". A new restoration screened as the opening film in 2012's touring The Film Lover: A François Truffaut Retrospective, inspiring Edward Guthmann's timely critical reassessment in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, "Truffaut's 'Mermaid' Merits Second Look".