O Atalante

The viewer is emerged in a simple film that transcends all sense of current time and space. Truffaut once said that he would prefer to make films with "dirty feet" than clean ones, and this film delivers such a world. The first mate on the barge has dirty feet -- and a magnificent collection of amusements and "magic". Watch for the puppet show! Charming to say the least as we delve into a mysterious lost world. It reminded me of the best of Cocteau with its magical feel, though it relied not at all on the mysticism and a magical world. It's at once a realist drama and a romantic fantasy.

I read once about someone saying that this film has been "surpassed" and is now overrated. What a fool. He's missing the whole point.

Show this one to your young children! They'll never forget it and love it forever!

L'Atalante is one of those films that doesn't really survive it's critical reputation. It's not so much that it's overrated as that its status as a Cinematic Masterpiece by a French Auteur casts a heavy burden on it which the light, airy film can't escape.

But enough meta-criticism. Taken on its own, L'Atalante is a charming film about a honeymoon whose light nature and relaxed pace manages to immerse the audience in a realm of simple pleasure. There's little dialogue, and Vigo draws on the attractions of silent film, with a lot of light humour and simple representational images. It's a world you would want to step into, and one that you almost think you can.

Alas, things cannot stay so serene forever, and so trouble eventually arrives in our honeymooners' relationship. The plot is believable and well-observed, if not exactly captivating, but I have to say I missed the more leisurely early parts.

I can't help but compare L'Atalante with a film with a similar storyline and inverted structure, F. W. Murnau's Sunrise. L'Atalante undeniably comes off worse in the comparison: it simply doesn't achieve the epic grandeur that Sunrise does. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it seems unavoidably like a prototype for a film released in the previous decade, and that makes it hard to live up to the hype. Still, it's a nice experience, and that's more than you can say about most films.

Forget that this shows up in magazine polls as among the ten or twenty best ever, that might set it up as something it's not and then we should be able to know for ourselves about the things we watch, develop an eye that effortlessly knows each thing in itself.

Concessions about what it's not, I didn't know all this myself, so let me quote some trivia. It was made in less than ideal conditions, by a filmmaker whose health had taken a turn for the worse (the tuberculosis that would claim him soon after), money run out at some point and they had to improvise stretches. The finishing shots were picked up without Vigo and it was probably edited without him.

Much like studio abuse heaped on Welles, it opened in truncated form, with another title tacked on by producers, got a lukewarm response and wasn't going to be rediscovered until much later. The restored version comes to us from as late as the 90s; it's moot to say how authorial it is.

And then to say that, far from an ideal project for Vigo, something he conceived from the start, it was a script about romance on a barge that came his way after producers had balked on something else he wanted to make, political. I have Vigo in my mind as someone who was fervent, eager to shuffle things and challenge norms, but alas, he would be gone within a year. Had he really been allowed to flourish and we had the luxury of a dozen films to evaluate, we might be looking back at this as something else.

We still have all that he captured on his last turn, the lovely journey, and even better so far as knowing him, the vision.

The journey has something immensely affirming about it, in how a girl from a small village agrees to marriage with the young captain of a small barge, refusing to settle for the ordinary life; she simply leaps into the boat with one clean swoop and leaves for a journey of horizons.

And this is Vigo's own commitment. He enters a story that is not his and sails on a journey of horizons. This is all mirrored in the girl who is so eager to simply take everything in, eager to brush up against everything, fascinated, keen to know. She's a joy to watch.

The whole film unfolds as something from her own soul, which is Vigo's. Characters brush up against each other in close quarters. Rooms are always overflowing with stuff, everything feels heaped together. There's a roughneck sailor onboard who has been all over the world, embodying all of Vigo's eagerness to share, now stories about Shanghai, then dance and play the accordion.

Zero de Conduite opened with two kids sharing toys with each other on a train, trying to impress and amuse each other. This is about youths sharing themselves with each other on a boat that sails through drab France, trying to find out. There's a lot of hugging and fondling between them with a sense of complete delight at the touch.

And this is how Vigo creates. Instead of "scenes" with beginning and end that advance a plot, tentative exploration, our eye rummaging through stuff. It feels like early Cassavetes. He's trying to find out what comes out from hiding.

Heartbreak eventually. The boy has grown increasingly controlling, dismayed at her free spiritedness. She wants to see Paris, he won't let her. Watch it to the end, it's lovely. He has dived in the river, looking to see her. She has been wandering alone around Paris. A marvelous scene intercuts between the two alone in separate beds, yearning towards the camera like out of New Wave. So she listens to music that summons up the old storytelling sailor who takes her back to him.

God knows what we were deprived of, in my mind even greater works. But I can see why Tarkovsky loved this.

Jean Vigo's 1934 work "L'Atalante" has a very timeless quality about it. It is far more visual than much of the early sound films that were released in America or abroad at the time, and really keeps more with the intensely artistic side of much of the best silent works. My eyes were completely transfixed on the screen the entire time, as I enjoyed the brilliant cinematography and took in the realistic, almost tragic, performances of the leads. Being very low on dialogue, or at least pertinent dialogue, and telling a rather simple story, this film may not be for everyone, but I would certainly highly recommend it for anyone who considers film to be an art form. Sadly Vigo dead within months of the film's release, and could not create any more masterpieces.

My big problem with "L'Atalante" is how much of what we see and hear was really Jean Vigo's intention (as he didn't finish it) when he was making it? The restored version is the only version and was reconstructed from many disparate bits about 15 years ago, meaning it has had running order interpretations foisted upon it. I think most of the film we see came from the BFI in London, remixed with other clips into some kind of logical sequence by Gaumont in Paris and sold as a Forgotten Masterpiece.

Well, if you can call such luck ending up as a masterpiece it was purely unintentional by Vigo - he didn't see what we do now.

What we have though is definitely a series of relentlessly beautiful, thought-provoking, impressionistic black and white images hung together for 87 minutes with a very flimsy story of 3 people on a barge. The kid was background fluff and doesn't really count. Simon was his usual farcical self, I wish he'd been background as well. Daste and Parla were both later in "La Grande Illusion", can you really forget her as the German widow Elsa in favour of this? The framings and compositions are wonderful to see - how important was it to include distant shots of power stations, cranes etc? Why did Daste stare right into the underwater camera? How come every available surface seems uncomfortable or strewn with bizarre objects or people? Why just the one short aerial shot? And so many other questions which are either pointless or beyond my intelligence; somebody somewhere must know!

I find every time I watch "L'Atalante" it grows on me - I thought it was pants in '91, now I think it's brill! We all move at different speeds - some people will never be able to see this as anything but boring while some people thought it was a classic before they saw it! Whereas I'm still on the voyage of discovery with this one and will definitely watch it again, but not as an indispensable film, more as akin to a trip to the Art Gallery.