L’Atalante (1934)

Directed by Jean Vigo. Starring Dita Parlo, Michel Simon, Jean Dasté, Louis Lefebvre.

The marriage between a canal barge captain (Dasté) and a girl from a small village (Parlo) gets off to a rocky start as they learn living with one another is difficult—he’s boorish and dirty, she dreams of Parisian nights, he’s quick to jealousy, she dislikes that he prefers the company of a crusty old shipmate (Simon), and so forth. On face value, a simple story, and one which should be pulling the incompatible lovers apart instead of building a persuasive case for love conquering all. But the effect is one of dizzy enchantment, rich with poetic images and cramped conflict and elemental feelings that cannot be controlled by logic. Indeed, my first viewing was distracted, and I felt little for anything that was happening beyond observational interest, and its fateful swell at the finish left me cold; a revisit made me realize it needed to sweep me up in its soft, yearning resolve. An initial critical and commercial failure, re-evaluated in the years to follow, and widely embraced by the French New Wavers. Following a couple of documentary short subjects and a short film (Zéro de Conduite; a.k.a., Zero for Conduct), this ended up being Jean Vigo’s only feature-length motion picture, dying of tuberculosis a few weeks after the movie’s release.

90/100