LEST we forget that Belmondo was quite simply interested and even in love with being a film-star (that sort of professional artist whose manner of appearance on screen and in photos projects his or her personal standards, and elicits public appeal), he came under the direction of the late Francois Truffaut, one of the most beautiful and endearing directors of French New- Wave cinema, in 1969’s ‘THE SIREN OF THE MISSISSIPPI’.

The importance of this film to Belmondo’s career exists on many levels. The first and not least is that Truffaut, despite being the kind of director who liked to tell a story in classic Hollywood narrative style (in contrast to Godard’s fragmented jump-cuts indebted to much of Eliot’s and Pound’s best long verse), nevertheless used this approach only as a comfortable comprehensive background for his strange, if subtle, method of achieving a synthesis of diverse creative ingredients put together like a resolved collage in ‘The Siren of The Mississippi’.

American influences
The first of these ingredients to take note of is that the film was based on the American mystery novel, ‘Waltz Into Darkness’, by the outstanding American writer, William Irish, also known as Cornell Woolrich, his real name. Truffaut loved these novels, and another of his beautiful films based on one is ‘THE BRIDE WORE BLACK’, with Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Claude Brialy.
However, Truffaut’s reputation as an ‘Auteur’ film director, the sort of stylist who uses the camera and scenes like a writer’s first-person narrative style, meant that whatever he presented on screen was strategically planned.
‘Siren…’ is in widescreen cinemascope and stunning colour, but just as important is Truffaut’s intentional placing of Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve, two of the highest paid and most popular French actors of the time, as French examples of the classic Hollywood method of projecting certain actors as visual standards.

Belmondo’s star-power
The importance and pleasure of cinema and its stars to people, audiences, or individuals have long been based on qualities distinct from the story or style of their films. Those qualities involve how actors look, how they dress, groom themselves, and for those who notice, the books they read or talk about, the paintings or art they observe or appreciate, and aspects of their profession in their roles they discuss on screen.
Truffaut deliberately put Belmondo and Deneuve in widescreen cinemascope (since the average film format limited that) in ‘The Siren of The Mississippi’ in order to show both of them simultaneously in brilliant scenes where a variety of artistic or natural qualities are also present. However, Belmondo and Deneuve were already fine examples of how to dress and present oneself, qualities which film fans can imitate without reserve or chagrin, since there is nothing negative in such pleasure which film culture encourages, and which continues the tradition of the great dressers on and off screen, such as Robert Mitchum, Robert Taylor, Cary Grant, Alan Ladd, Audie Murphy, James Dean, Glen Ford, Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra, Marcello Mastroianni, Alain Delon, Steve McQueen, Sean Connery, or actresses like Jean Harlow, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Shirley Maclaine, Jean Seberg, Marilyn Monroe, Monica Vitti, Sophia Loren, or Bridgette Bardot.

New-Wave value
Belmondo complements Truffaut’s brilliant synthetic content and style in ‘The Siren of The Mississippi’ by his visual appearance, which is in keeping with the director’s emphasis on film’s ability to be visually pleasurable. This pleasure is both external and internal, since Truffaut changes many things from Irish’s novel by his ‘auteur’ style, not least of all  the novel’s fatalistic similarity to classic Hollywood Film Noir’s often grim fatalism, which, in Truffaut’s hands, becomes more humane, more hopeful, and far less destructive.
Deneuve’s ‘femme fatale’ role is not totally bad, and Belmondo is not destroyed by her; in fact, they end up as lovers saved from destruction by realising that their type of story has already been told in art, which they are aware of and therefore learn from. This is Truffaut’s New-Wave philosophy of art within art.
This fits in with Belmondo’s roles as a lesser fatalistic contemporary man, not driven to self-destruction as occurs in many repetitive violent American films. Also, Truffaut changed Irish’s story from its original setting in New Orleans in the 19th Century, to the remote tropical island location of Reunion in the Indian Ocean in the 20th Century, where Belmondo is a tobacco plantation owner. This reflected Belmondo’s continued interaction with distant tropical geographies in his ongoing film career.

Belmondo’s cosmopolitanism
Belmondo’s continued interaction with tropical distant geographies in his on-going film career reflected similar concerns in Truffaut’s and De Broca’s films. Truffaut shared Godard’s and the New-Wave’s ethnological and anthropological influences, which we see in his films like ‘THE WILD CHILD’, ‘The Siren of The Mississippi’, ‘BED AND BOARD’, and ‘THE STORY OF ADELE H’.
Indeed, in the latter film, the story moves from France to the Canadian maritime coast of Nova Scotia, and ends on the Caribbean island of Barbados.
In ‘Siren…’, the tropical background of the film is a lush contrast to Europe in winter, which the film underlines visually. Belmondo’s screen personality is therefore linked to a flexible new cosmopolitan man at home in diverse landscapes of the world’s physical makeup. This also complements Belmondo’s un-heroic quotidian characterizations, as in 1975’s delightful ‘L’INCORRIGIBLE’, once again directed by the exciting De Broca, who directed Belmondo a decade earlier in ‘THAT MAN FROM RIO’.
In ‘L’Incorrigible’, Belmondo is a hilarious and largely unsuccessful con-man who wants to justify his schemes by proposing to build a much-needed seawall to protect his French coastal hometown. He seduces a girl whose parents are curators of an art museum containing a famous El Greco canvas he wants to steal.
At one point when his schemes backfire, he dreams of giving up everything and retiring to Caracas, which, in the 1970s and 80s, was a gorgeous tropical cosmopolitan city much loved and celebrated by some of the world’s avant-garde or advanced film directors, actors/actresses, painters, sculptors, writers and musicians who filled this highly cultured city’s cafes, cinemas, art museums and galleries in their sojourn there.
In the end, Belmondo’s on-and-off screen personality dissolves into the tapestry of the New-Wave’s cool but firmly accomplished and satisfying artistic style like a colour, shape or form that is synonymous with the star-making personality of this exceptional actor.