L' Atalante
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Movie Reviews of L' Atalante
Movie Review: Essential
Summary: 5 Stars
This is my favorite movie; Dita Parlo and particularly Michel Simon are wonderful. The restoration is phenomenal. The DVD release is otherwise not particularly good but the movie is a treasure.Movie Review: Gritty young love in Great Depression era France
Summary: 4 Stars
If you want to know how stupid, raw, sexist, naive, passionate, jealous and accepting two young french newlyweds can be - this is the film for you. Juliette and Jean are a young working class couple who embark on a difficult life on a canal barge called L'Atalante. The best characterization in the film is by Juliette, an utterly charming and lovely young, blond frenchwoman who, with great aplomb takes up married life with a brute of a husband, the captain of L'Atalante. The plot has been spelled out elsewhere, so I won't go into that. Suffice to say the eternal formula of enchantment, betrayal, suffering and reconciliation is in evidence.
In the Great Depression years of 1930's France, in an urban landscape so bleak and despairing, the madness of young love plays out in flirting, jealousy, violence, absurdity and joy. Do you suburbanites ever expect to know all that? Will you find it at the mall, wrapped in celophane, priced on sale at $79.99? The scenes in this film take place before television, computers, atomic weapons, ethnic cleansing in europe, electric kitchen appliances, wall to wall carpets, smoke alarms, CAT scans, cadaver body part replacements, and MTV.
The bleakness of urban France plays out in the background. The lines at soup kitchens or job openings. The theft of Juliette's handbag and the brutal beating of the thief by the crowd that caught up with him. The gendarme dragging him away. The now absurd sight of the performer who became obsessed with her to the point of following her to the L'Atalante on a bicycle, carrying on his back a huge drum, a trombone and a few other instruments of the one man band sort - serenading her on the barge until Jean cuffed him and tossed him off.
The perfomer's obsessive 'love' contrasted with the ultimately more enduring love and passion of the young couple, who, after the shameful scene of the husband, Jean, deciding to leave her stranded in port after her fling with the other man played out with him coming to his senses to return for her. In the poignant last scene Juliette boards L'Atalante and enters their cabin where Jean awaits, having shaved and spruced himself up on being told she was approaching.
In a way twenty-first century folks may not recognize, love, passion, and joy triumph as they fall into each others arms. How a charming, captivating young woman like Juliette can forgive the despicable behavior of her new husband, I can't fathom. Or how Jean can endure to see the woman he loves accepting the gratuitous flirting of the other man without becoming enraged, I find equally impossible. Nonetheless, in each of our lives we have to learn to accept five impossible things before breakfast each day. We have to be simple and forgiving like animals at play. Puppies know more about how to live a life than we do in this new century. We live like ants. They lived like human beings.
Movie Review: Absorbing and fun.
Summary: 4 Stars
L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)
Jean Vigo made only two feature films before his premature death in 1934. L'Atalante was the second of them, and as a testament both to the potential Jean Vigo had to become the world's finest filmmaker of the time and the small legacy he left behind, I doubt anyone could have asked for a better tombstone.
The story ostensibly concerns Jean (Jean Daste, who probably appears in more films on They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?'s Top 1000 Films than any other actor) and Juliette (The Grand Illusion's Dita Parlo), opening with their marriage and the beginning of their life on Jean's barge. And the movie does concern itself with Jean and Juliette's rocky marriage, it's true, but said marriage seems more a way for Vigo and co-writers Jean Guinee and Albert Riera to introduce Juliette to interesting people and situations. Perhaps the most interesting of these is Jean's first mate (Boudu Saved from Drowning's Michel Simon, in one of the finest roles in a career filled with great ones), a wise, if somewhat crazy, old man who's obsessed with cats. Simon effortlessly steals every scene he's in-- which, given the quality of the cast, is nothing short of amazing.
This is not to say that the relationship between Jean and Juliette is a minor consideration. Unlike Carne's Children of Paradise, where the story is a convenient launching pad for Carne and Prevert's explorations of nineteenth-century Paris, we never lose sight of our main characters here for very long. The story is a simple one-- boy marries girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl again-- but Vigo, when he's not spinning amusing side stories, invests Jean and Juliette with a passion rare in the repressive thirties. (Derek Malcolm quotes Alfred Bazin saying of Vigo that he had an "almost obscene taste for flesh.") Reportedly, this mirrors the marriage of Vigo and his wife Elizabeth; upon Vigo's death, it is said, she had to be restrained from jumping out a window to her own. How could someone in that kind of a relationship not have an almost obscene taste for flesh, I ask you?
L'Atalante is a feast for the mind and the senses. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder why Jean Vigo isn't a household name. (And why he wasn't at the time of his death, either.) More than anything, though, you'll simply enjoy it. **** ˝
Movie Review: To See Paris and ...
Summary: 4 Stars
"People are strange when you are stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you are unwanted
Streets are uneven when you are down..." by Jim Morrsion (1963-1971)
...And city of light and love is dark and depressing when you are there without your beloved.
Director Jean Vigo died young (at 29, of septicemia) just after he finished his third and last film, "L'Atalante" which is one of the screen's great romances, about a young barge captain Jean (Jean Daste), who takes his bride Juliette (Dita Parlo) to live aboard his boat. They are in love, they fight, she disappears to see Paris, he goes searching for her, can not find her, they are both desperate and miserable until the first mate (Michel Simon in a superb comical performance) decides to find her and bring her back...
The film has many magical moments - one of them is the movie's most erotic scene that display both Jean and Juliette tossing in their lonely beds during one aching night of separation searching for each other, longing for each other, realizing how painful and meaningless life is without the one they love.
Vigo knew that he was dying - "I am killing myself with L'Atalante", he said. His death at 29 is one of the cinema's great losses. We can only imagine what masterpieces he could've created. L'Atalante with its simple compelling story, humanity, intense, lyrical romanticism and candid eroticism shows that Vigo was a visionary and experimentalist of outstanding quality.
Filmmakers as diverse as Francois Truffaut and Lindsay Anderson have acknowledged Vigos's influence on their work.
Highly recommended: 4.5/5
Movie Review: Amazing film, disappointing DVD
Summary: 4 Stars
L'Atalante is one of the most beautiful films ever made. If you're considering buying it, then you probably already know this. But the DVD is a little disappointing. It's great that the film's been restored, but why isn't there a "letterbox" option on the disc so we feel confident we're seeing the full frame as shot by Boris Kaufman? This always bothers me. If there's some reason why the film must be reformatted, then an insert or some commentary should provide an explanation.
Another problem is that the title of the featurette included on the disc, "The Making of L'Atalante," is a little misleading. It focuses mainly on the actors and there's very little information about Vigo himself or the actual production of the film. I found it disappointing.
Still, Vigo is such a wonderful, tragic figure, and everything he touched is so unique and beautiful, that there's no way to give less than four stars. And I think the DVD is much better than any of the VHS copies that have been released.