L'ATALANTE Movie Review

Le Chaland Qui Passe

Juliette (Dita Parlo) is a newly married bride whose husband Jean (Jean Dasté) is a mate aboard the barge named l'Atalante. Unhappy with her unglamorous life aboard ship, and frustrated by tales of the outside world's wonders—spun magically by the cantankerous old first mate Père Jules (Michel Simon)—Juliette makes a break for it when the barge docks in Paris. Alone in separate beds, his on the barge and hers in a cheap Parisian hotel, Jean and Juliette toss and turn, utterly confused by the turn their lives have taken while longing restlessly for each other's familiar bodies. That the satisfying conclusion that L'Atalante soon reaches is, perhaps, predictable, is the least important element of the film. In fact, nothing about this simple tale is, on the surface, all that exceptional; as the outline of a film script it reads like a sketchy treatment that needs fleshing out. That might have been the case with the finished product, if it hadn't been directed by a genius. Jean Vigo was 29 when he directed what may be the most purely poetic and eloquently primal love story ever put on film. The power of L'Atalante is cumulative, as a series of what appear to be offhanded and quirky moments, both melodramatic and comic, culminate in a simple but shockingly moving moment of rescue—from pride, from danger, from one's self—that is as sure to provoke tears on each viewing as is the single, transcendent sentence that John Wayne speaks to Natalie Wood at the end of The Searchers. Photographed by the legendary Boris Kaufman (brother of Soviet director Dziga Vertov) and scored with an easy majesty by Charles Goldblatt and Maurice Jaubert (whose music would be reprised for some of the later films of François Truffaut), L'Atalante would be the last film by Jean Vigo, who died before the film's final editing. The studio found L'Atalante self-indulgent (nothing ever changes in the movie business), retitled it Le Chaland qui Passe, and opened and closed it quickly. The full L'Atalante was only released in 1945, and in the 1990s, a restored version was circulated in American art houses to the rapturous reviews and public acceptance it has always deserved.

NEXT STOP … Zero for Conduct, A Propos de Nice, Harvest

1934 82m/B FR Dita Parlo, Jean Daste, Michel Simon; D: Jean Vigo; W: Jean Vigo, Jean Guinee, Albert Riera; C: Boris Kaufman, Louis Berger; M: Maurice Jaubert. VHS NOS, HHT, PMS