L'ATALANTE (1934) - ♦♦♦♦♦

Director - Jean Vigo

Written by - Jean Guinée, Albert Riéra, Jean Vigo

Starring - Michel Simon, Dita Parlo, Jean Dasté

"JEAN VIGO's short and brief career was to culminate with what was to be his first and sadly last feature film, at the age of 29. However, following the controversy spurred by his previous work ZERO FOR CONDUCT, that had freely taken shots at the French education system, it was not his original intention to bring L'ATALANTE to the screen, but a film about a French anarchist - a subject he was passionate about, given VIGO was the son of the militant anarchist MIGUEL ALMEREYDA. 

But in the end, this seemingly harmless passionate and tragic love story about young newlywed barge-dwellers is absolutely sublime. The narrative is driven by their fiery passion, a passion so great that it leads to stubbornness. And so as their life carries on on the titular barge, they begin to develop different ambitions, and she starts dreaming of life on the streets of Paris. This ambiton ultimately separates them, and leads top an excellent show of the pure longing and sadness of their separation, as they regret ever parting. 

But there is more to it than the narrative, simple and yet heartfelt, that is praiseworthy in L'ATALANTE. It is also the way in which pure charm, colourful characters and sometimes flirtations with fairytale elements rise out of the dirt and drab of the barge. This is captured wonderfully by the organic cinematography provided by DZIGA VERTOV's younger brother BORIS KAUFMAN, whose etheral shots are also impregnated with a stark realism that lacks the usual manipulation of romantic films. This also lends a disarming starkness to the movement, and a real sexual intensity that still feels real to this day. 

Much praise goes to the performances in the larger than life characters, another fable like element, but perhaps more than that JEAN VIGO's intuitive casting. While one might have predicted the ability of one of France's greatest cinema actors of the time, MICHEL SIMON as a lovable, gullible, stray cat loving adventurer, JEAN DASTE was far more inexperienced and yet his turn as the captain and newlywed husband is one of cinema's purest and true representations of masculine inflexibility. 

GAUMONT had bought the rights to distribute the film, but hates the original cut, which they called confusing, inconsequential and other junk. Taking advantage of JEAN VIGO's relentlessly failing health, that would lead to his premature death and the loss of one of French cinema's most promising masters, they put together a version that flopped outrageously, in which even MAURICE JAUBERT's sublime score was tweaked in order to include a popular tune named LE CHALAND QUI PASSE, that also became the film's new title. 

VIGO died shortly after its release, and it was not until years after his death that the film would be screened in its original form and that his myth would be celebrated in the cinematic art. FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT, a big fan of L'ATALANTE famously said that with it the director had effortlessly achieved poetry. In this sense, he meant that the technique of the film was not driven by form, and rather by a more collective enthusiasm. And he was certainly right."

Drama, France