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Review
At first sight, this would appear to be a pretty run-of-the-mill kind of love story.
However, the end result is anything but ordinary, and the film is now almost universally
regarded as one of the greatest and most influential French films ever made.
This is all the more surprising given the troubled history of the film. After its initial showing in 1934, the film was subjected to a major re-edit, with many scenes moved around and 20 minutes of footage removed. The original score by Maurice Jaubert was replaced by a popular song and the film renamed "Le Chaland qui Passe". In spite of these changes, the film was poorly received and was a box office disaster. However, some years later, the film was restored to its original form and now is rightly regarded as a beautiful film and an important part of French cinema history. It is difficult to pin-point wherein lies the magic of L’Atalante. It was the final film of the young director Jean Vigo, who, a T.B. sufferer, died of septicemia shortly after the film was released, at the age of 29. Despite his comparative youth and inexperience as a film director (this was only his fourth film), Vigo’s direction has an uncanny maturity and confidence, which often appears sophisticated by the standards of the early 1930s. It is certainly a contrast to his earlier films, which were more cynical and less accessible than this. The story of Atalante would appear to have been of great importance to Jean Vigo. The camera work is again excellent by the standards of 1934, with some very moving images of France during the 1930s depression, matching the mood of the piece when the lovers are separated very well. The surreal scene where a melancholic Jean dives into the canal and sees a mirage of Juliette in her wedding dress is particularly noteworthy. Another important element is Jaubert’s magnificent, often haunting, musical score, which heightens the mood very well throughout. However, the film’s trump card is probably Michel Simon as the barge hand, Père Jules, arguably his most successful film role. He brings a humour to the film which is pleasing without distracting from the main story. And, in L’Atalante he has two of the best and funniest lines of any French film from this period. Dita Parlo and Jean Dasté are well-cast as the two newly weds, with fine character performances from some lesser members of the cast. This is an excellent film by any standards, but it is probably the untimely death of its director, Jean Vigo, that marks it out as particularly special. It hints at those great films which would have followed if Vigo had lived, but which the world of cinema has been cruelly denied. © James Travers 1999 Essay At the time of his death, in his twenties
from tuberculosis, Jean Vigo had made exactly four films, three of which have been pored
over by every cinéaste in the world: for me, his masterpiece, the iconoclastic,
exuberant documentary satirizing the resort crowd, A propos de Nice (1929); the
marvelously spirited and surreal Zéro de conduite (1933), about a boys’
boarding school; and L’Atalante, made while Vigo was rapidly expiring, and considered
by some to be the greatest film ever made. L’Atalante is almost as likely
nowadays as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Dreyer’s Passion of Joan
of Arc (1928) or Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) to turn up on some exalted list of
the ten best films ever made. I must exist on a different planet emotionally, for
Vigo’s last film, for all its charm and splendid black-and-white cinematography (by Boris
Kaufman, Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman’s brother, and Louis Berger), continues to strike
me as a slight, largely atmospheric thing. It’s ephemeral; it always seems, while
one watches it, capable of dissolving and disappearing entirely.
Indeed, the frailty of L’Atalante, which presumably corresponds to the sickly young life whose crowning achievement the film has become (initially, audiences and critics weren’t all that impressed by it), profoundly moves a good many viewers--this frailty, that is, coupled with the film’s embrace of ordinary life. L’Atalante has crossed over into the regions of meta-cinema on the winged back of the boy who made much of it from a stretcher. It has become a testament to Vigo’s short, hard life, in which every breath, shallowly drawn, was infinitely precious. Little of this personal history, though, invests the film, for me, with magic; I want it to, each and every time I revisit L’Atalante, but nothing comes of this fervent wish. I am dry-docked, perpetually unable to enter the world of cinema’s most celebrated river barge. I admire L’Atalante on many scores: the way it interweaves sound and silent cinema; the use of camera position and angle and the mise-en-scène to convey the below-deck cramped quarters of the barge; the lyrical beauty of so much of the film; its recurrent song by Maurice Jaubert, which heightens the lyricism; the eroticism, sometimes in waves, sometimes as undertow; the film’s marriage of intimacy and grand passions. The premise of the story is simple. A boy and a girl, Jean (Jean Dasté, marvelous) and Juliette (Dita Parlo, vibrant and gorgeous), marry. The boy is a barge captain, and his travels might easily make his level of experience seem beyond that of the villager he has wed. But Juilette is the one who makes wedded life difficult between the two. Their home is a barge, after all, and they aren’t the only ones onboard; there are also a sailor, Jules (Michel Simon, in one of his greatest performances), and a cabin boy. And there are Jules’s cats, one of which deigns to birth a litter on the wedding bed. Jean is the first to complain about this, to which Jules retorts that cats "are no more dirty than you and not as dumb," but when Juliette strips the bed to retaliate against both the messiness of river life that the adorable new kittens represent and the procreative record they embody that frightens her into feelings of marital inadequacy, he barks at her. (Incidentally, Vigo himself was born in Paris in an attic full of cats.) Poor Juliette; doing laundry once a year, as is Jean’s habit, seems insufficient; she announces, "Things are going to change around here!" Onboard L’Atalante, a period of adjustment requires some getting used to of each marital partner by the other. Frankly, my chief concern is for the cats. Jean’s makeshift and untidy life must indeed prove a shock to a peasant girl with that bugaboo of French life, bourgeois aspirations. (Cleanliness is next to upward mobility.) Juliette tries hard to fit in, and, being not only a boy but a French boy, Jean doesn’t respond with a great deal of sympathy or sensitivity. He wants to have his wedding cake and eat it, too; that is, Jean upends his life with marriage but nonetheless wants to maintain the status quo of old ways. He might have better read the writing on the river; his bride, after all, boarded L’Atalante by swinging on a boom. Some guys can’t see trouble coming no-how. The barge docks in Paris. Jean promises Juliette a night on the town in the city she has dreamt of experiencing. Unfortunately, they have to stay onboard when Jules takes off and gets drunk, but the couple has a happy time together, the next day, at a working-class dance hall until a vendor there (a model, perhaps, for the Fool in Federico Fellini’s 1954 La strada) flirts with Juliette, making Jean jealous. Later, believing that L’Atalante will remain docked there until the next day, Juliette steals away; she just has to see Paris. When Jean discovers her missing, feeling abandoned, he insists on pushing off to Corbeil. He leaves port, consumed by two thoughts: How can he compete with the vendor with material wares? How can he compete with Paris? His rapid deterioration in inconsolable grief perhaps echoes the state of Vigo’s own dissipation from tuberculosis. When Jean nearly gets fired by the company for which they work, Jules comes to his eventual rescue by reuniting the two lovers. I love the central idea of the film, that its characters, even gruff Jules, all are vulnerable beneath their practiced and settled-into surfaces. But, with the music and romance, I can’t help comparing L’Atalante to such contemporary films by René Clair as Under the Rooftops of Paris (1930), Le million (1931) and Quatorze Juillet (1933) -- films, perhaps, not so lyrically intense, not so perfectly beautiful to behold, but somehow more rounded and, yes, more politically inclined. Don’t I have a right to expect this of L’Atalante on other grounds, namely, that Vigo’s A propos de Nice and Zéro de conduite are themselves more politically inclined than L’Atalante? (Like his father, who died in prison in 1917, Vigo was an anarchist.) Having made such Leftist marvels as the two earlier films, Vigo seems to have gone out of his way to expunge (except by the faintest indirection) political bite from his deathbed film. I applaud the romance; I miss the politics. On the other hand, L’Atalante may be, in another sense, more, not less, personal than Vigo’s other films. Some feel that it more fully expresses his gay sensibility. Perhaps that’s the sense in which L’Atalante is also, somehow, political; but it may not be the sense that most matters. A propos de Nice’s assault on classism and Zéro de conduite’s assault on authoritarianism direct and deepen their extraordinary visual beauty and acuity. By comparison, expressing fully one’s sexual orientation (whatever it is), as L’Atalante perhaps does, strikes me as a far lesser accomplishment. Still, some of the film’s imagery captivates: in her white wedding gown, Juliette walking across the barge against a darkened sky as another, more quickly moving barge passes by -- cinema’s most stunning projection of a character’s feeling of sexual unreadiness; an upward shot of Jean as, in the fog-drenched dark, he gropes blindly throughout the length of the barge in search of his "lost" Juliette, and, upon finding her, their seemingly sturdy kiss and embrace rendered evanescent by the sheets of fog quickly passing through (to our eye) behind them; the angled overhead shot of Juliette and Jules as she pokes his ample belly and has him model the skirt she is sewing for herself--all humorous business for her, but with proud (if misguided) flirtation on his part; after Juliette’s departure, Jean’s underwater swim, where he is bedeviled by a diaphanous image of Juliette, in her wedding gown, turning around and around; in long shot, Jules’s lonely walk over a bridge and to a boulevard bench, in Le Havre, in the first lap of his search for the missing "boss-lady," which boldly concludes when he miraculously comes across her, picks her up, plants her across his shoulder and carries her away; Jean’s quick, endearing tidying up when he hears from the cabin boy that Jules is returning with Juliette; the lovers’ rapturous embrace on the floor of their quarters--an echo of their similar embrace on the floor of the deck right after their wedding. The high points of this film are high indeed.
Contributors to the film’s two successive scripts are Jean Guinée, Vigo, and and
Albert Vièra. How Vigo visually realized the little story at hand accounts
for the quality of the film. L’Atalante isn’t trivial, but I say again it’s
slight, despite a wonderful image here and there. Let’s not, like Juliette, get
carried away. L’Atalante certainly isn’t one of the world’s great films, much less
the greatest. User Comments
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Director:
Jean Vigo
Starring: Michel Simon, Dita Parlo, Jean Dasté, Gilles Margaritis, Louis Lefebvre Synopsis
This is the story of a young village woman, Juliette, who joins her new husband,
Jean, a bargeman on his working barge, L’Atalante. After a while, Juliette
grows tired of her new life traversing the canals of France and yearns to visit Paris.
During a brief visit to the city, Juliette encounters a young pedler and appears to be
attracted to him. Jealous, when Juliette subsequently goes off on a trip, Jean sets
off in his barge, leaving Juliette behind. After a period of separation and great
anguish, the husband and wife are finally reunited.
Credits
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