L’Atalante *****

 

the next in the series, no 16

by Allan Fish

(France 1934 89m) DVD1/2

Aka. Le Chaland qui Passe

We’re on the canals to sail all day!

p  J.L.Nounez-Gaumont  d  Jean Vigo  w  Jean Guinée, Jean Vigo, Albert Riera  ph  Boris Kaufman, Louis Berger  ed  Louis Chavence  m  Maurice Jaubert  art  Francis Jourdain

Jean Dasté (Jean), Dita Parlo (Juliette), Michel Simon (Père Jules), Giles Margarites (Peddler), Louis Lefébvre (Cabin boy), Fanny Clair (Juliette’s mother), Raphael Diligent (Juliette’s father), Jacques Prévert, Pierre Prévert,

There can be fewer better loved films in the history of French cinema than Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante.  For many years, even decades, it was the sole seen example of his work, the single flickering flame that burnt to his cinematic memory.  Now that his earlier shorter works are available, it makes L’Atalante not seem quite such a privilege…at least in that sense.  Anyone, however, who does not feel privileged to have seen it, is without a cinematic soul.

Such as it is, the story follows the fortunes of a young couple as they prepare to get married, finally do so, and retire to the groom’s barge – where he is the captain – for an alternative honeymoon period.  Bliss soon gives way to exasperation and frustration, sexually and otherwise, with the lack of privacy.  When on shore leave, our young wife is charmed by a peddler with the gift of the gab who dazzles her with tales of the bright lights of Paris.  Soon sick of her life, she jumps ship to seek something more than water everywhere.  Her devastated husband contemplates suicide, even trying to drown himself, before his friend realises enough is enough and goes off to find the stray wife. 

            Plot was never the real interest of Vigo, so much as experimentation, pushing back boundaries and what Arletty later reacted badly to being referred to having in Hotel du Nord; namely, atmosphere!  And the reference is not entirely a redundant one.  There are whole sequences here, particularly when Simon looks for Parlo in town, that eerily look ahead to Carné and Prévert’s later work.  Yet Vigo’s masterpiece is more than a precursor to that film, but the entire poetic realist movement.  (Indeed, the Prévert brothers both appeared in tiny cameos.)  There are images here that cannot help but stir the senses, in both an aesthetic and intellectual sense.  Vigo’s film borrows a bit from several similar movies set on barges in the early talkie years, but it’s that atmosphere that rings truest.  It may have essences of surrealist fantasy, but much of the sentiment is rooted in reality, and it’s also remarkably sensual.  If sailing up and down a canal on a barge may not seem very romantic, Vigo contrives to make it the essence of romanticism.  His deliberately quite plain looking lovers added a sense of authenticity that fake glamour deprives one of.  Furthermore, it’s also quite hilarious.  Who cannot laugh at the opening sequences as the couple prepare for the wedding, with guests complaining at there being no reception and the bride’s attempts to bring some cleanliness to the barge’s customary squalor? 

            Seventy years on Vigo’s film shows no sign of ageing, still seeming as refreshing as on the day it was first released.  But it remains a minority film for the most discerning of cineastes.  There’s a certain sadness to be felt, too, at Vigo’s tragically early death little more than days after the premiere.  His four film career proving that old adage that quality counts infinitely more than quality.  Yet how can one go without mentioning the piece de resistance, the incomparable Michel Simon?  Not as Père Jules, he is Père Jules, and even for arguably the greatest of French character actors of the thirties, it’s his finest hour, whether cheating himself at draughts, perching kittens on his back, playing the accordion, visiting fortune sellers or merely ogling Parlo.  It’s a performance filled with joie de vivre in which he creates one of the all-time great French movie characters.  The lovers may finally writhe in the floor in what we hope is pre-orgasmic bliss, but it’s Simon – and Vigo – we’re thinking of.  Grabbing Jules’ megaphone, we cry “Paris, O beautiful and wonderful city, hail L’Atalante, most timeless and wondrous of films!“