Retrospective Film Review
L’Atalante (1934) • 90 Years Later — lyrical, graceful romance of the rebellious heart
A newly married couple and a ship captain struggle through marriage as they travel on the L’atalante along with the captain’s first mate and a cabin boy.
Glancing through reviews of L’Atalante (also known as Le Chaland qui passe / The Passing Barge), such expressions as “poetry” and “lyricism” are impossible to miss. Ardent, sensuous, melancholic, and enchanting, this 1934 masterpiece is a hymn to love and all of its facets and subtleties. A leading pioneer of poetic realism in 1930s France, what made director Jean Vigo, who died of tuberculosis in his twenties and had only made this one feature, the forebear of every major film movement of the mid-to-late 20th century is his verve and versatility.
When Vittorio De Sica and Luis Buñuel situated children within the exploitative jungle of society in Shoeshine (1946) and Los Olvidados (1950) — two major works of Spanish and Italian neorealism — the shadow of Vigo’s Zero for Conduct (1933) hangs over them. Nor could François Truffaut and Lindsay Anderson have railed against the school system in The 400 Blows (1959) and If…. (1968) — critical works of the French New Wave and British New Wave respectively — without paying homage to the 1933 featurette about a school rebellion against their imbecilic masters. When Vigo satirized the excess bourgeois leisure in his first experimental documentary short À propos de Nice (1930), the techniques anticipate the essay films of Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard.
A commercial failure as well as the only project he didn’t have a free hand in (its initial release was butchered down by 20 minutes), L’Atalante may be conventional and simplistic on the surface — with two newly-weds on the Seine, an ailurophilic old salt comic relief, a cabin boy, and a clownish bit-playing peddler — but contained within its gritty world of lamps and claustrophobic quarters is playful affections and a feverishly dreamlike eroticism; you sense the colours without seeing them.
Born to the Spanish anarchist Miguel Almereyda, from whom Vigo inherited a free-spirited iconoclasm that would characterise his works and those of his disciples, the young rebel in boarding schools got into photography through his stepfamily, a passion that eventually evolved into cinema. “Vigo was not a sad man”, his daughter Luce Vigo remarked. “Very often people say, Oh, he was ill, he lost his father in a jail [due to political persecution, later died under suspicious circumstances]. But he was full of desire, full of wit, and you feel it.”
In Zero for Conduct, the outrageous acts of defiance from the students are interlaced with slapstick and absurdism, and the rebellion ends in triumph and optimism. The French censors at the time were so outraged that it was banned outright. Here in L’Atalante, the humour sublimes, but you also get the sense that it never left the ground. Not unlike early Fellini, the bits and eccentricities were channelled through the working-class zeal of the characters, their imperfections, and raw human emotions.
Dita Parlo and Jean Dasté, as the young lovers Juliette and Jean, poke fun at one another, intoxicating themselves in the carnal pleasures of each other. They may be only cogs in the unimpressive machine that is their barge (named “L’atalante”) but they wake up each morning singing lovely tunes into their lover’s ears. But, their mutual fondness fades; as we learn in love stories, love needs time to cement itself.
Though we never felt vividly the sense of longing and isolation of Juliette’s life on the water (even though a distinct claustrophobia haunts us subliminally), a commedia dell’arte peddler’s promise of beauty and glamour seduces us as it does her, with magic tricks, shiny objects, and flowery words. Jealousy and self-abasement fill up Jean’s mind, as he leaves her behind when she snuck out for Paris, the place where that false promise begins, and ends.
Regret soon takes over as one learns of the crimes and poverty beneath the urban gilt of Paris, and the other of her music and reflections in the water. However, the film does not eviscerate us of humour: the old Père Jules, played by Michel Simon (La Chienne), is here to the rescue with his skittish burlesques of tap dancing, wrestling, and bullfighting. His stuffily cramped cabin, filled with the paraphernalia he gathered from travelling around the world, is like a grown child’s recreation room: it’s too compact to contain his longing and frisky imagination.
When aboard the ship and stumbling upon it, Juliette runs into a Japanese hand fan just as she is moving on from a broken phonograph. “Nothing but the finest things,” he boasted. When he cuts a small wound on his hand with a navaja, she opens her mouth in shock and unconsciously sticks out her tongue. Then a moment later, he undresses topless to show off his Rubenesque tattoos, as she gets visibly annoyed at his cat crawling on her dress. “He made jokes all the time,” Dasté once said of Vigo, “Spending a day with him was wonderful and gruelling, even a few weeks before his death. He was such a vivacious person.”
If the comedy here found its flourishes without being forced, then the febrile sense of romance was elevated by Freudian surrealism. Accompanied by a Maurice Jaubert score that is at times queer and pantaloon, at times mellow and poignant, two sequences — one of Jean picturing an ideal image of Juliette superimposed underwater, and the other of the two lovers in separate beds, moving sensually in patterns that match one another as if they are of one consciousness — are more erotic and emotionally moving than any sanitised rom-coms of the period; it is Buñuel & Dalí without the satirical force and violence. According to critic André Bazin, Vigo “had an almost obscene taste for the flesh.”
Vigo met cinematographer Boris Kaufman while making À propos de Nice. The younger brother of Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera) who shot the photogenically transcendental Ménilmontant (1926) and would go on to shoot On the Waterfront (1954) and 12 Angry Men (1957), Kaufman brought to Vigo’s movies the documentary naturalism of Soviet modernist films. The images and sequences here are often raw and seemingly unarranged, but it has a crude strength that matches well with the milieu of steel and misty canals — you sense the rudiments of the steadily vigorous rhythm and movement of his later works.
In an early shot, the camera’s focus stays on Juliette as she limps from one to the other end of the barge, and the illusion that the ship is the only object in motion might leave you swooned. Together with the dreaminess, the movie is at once a work of documentary and poetry — two elements reinforcing the other, resulting in an organic whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
Voting for L’Atalante in the Sight and Sound Critics’ Poll, Lucy Sante wrote:
L’Atalante does contain the world — all of life in miniature: work and love and play, dream and lust and adventure, rapture and heartbreak and reconciliation, and birth and death by implication.
Sidenote: I came across a review of the film by director Michael Almereyda (Tesla, Marjorie Prime, Experimenter), who shares a suspiciously similar name with Vigo’s revolutionary father. Fate or coincidence?
FRANCE | 1934 | 65 MINUTES (ORIGINAL RELEASE) • 85 MINUTES (RESTORED VERSION) | 1.37:1 | BLACK & WHITE | FRENCH • RUSSIAN
Cast & Crew
director: Jean Vigo.
writers: Jean Vigo & Albert Riéra (based on an idea by Jean Guinée).
starring: Michel Simin, Dita Parlo & Jean Dasté.
Originally published at https://www.framerated.co.uk on September 11, 2024. All copyrighted images are used according to the Fair Use doctrine in US & UK law.
