L'Atalante

There aren't many classics that are as deceptively simple as "L'Atalante". Its gentle, contemplative tone - punctuated by occasional stretches of Michel Simon's antics - conceals a carefully made film with some worthwhile themes that go beyond the story itself. The lavish praises that it sometimes receives have perhaps created unrealistic expectations, which is unfortunate, because it is a fine, though understated, classic.

Jean and Juliette, the two main characters, both have strengths and weaknesses that make them believable. Jean is responsible and disciplined, while Juliette is easygoing and gregarious (which makes her the easiest of the two to appreciate and to sympathize with). But Jean's rigidity and his occasional impatience, in combination with Juliette's naiveté and her occasional impulsiveness, make for difficulties in their relationship.

If they seem boring when compared to the couples in many other movie romances, it is precisely this that makes the film worthwhile. It focuses closely on two ordinary people, without distracting frills or forced social commentary. Most of us are not all that interesting to others, and our lives and problems are usually important only to us. It is part of Jean Vigo's achievement that he takes two such commonplace characters and makes them worth caring about, and by implication he tells us that we are all worth caring about, even if we and our lives may not matter much to others.

By keeping most of the action on board the boat, Vigo not only creates an atmosphere, but also forces the attention onto the characters. Simon's rather exaggerated character is used both to vary the pacing when appropriate, and to respond to the traits and actions of Jean and Juliette. The photography and the score are also used to round out the picture.

It may be true that the film is sometimes over-praised, but in large part that is simply an over-reaction to the unfortunate lack of attention that this kind of classic must so often endure. In an era when so many very weak recent movies have received regular television airings, special edition DVD's with all kinds of pointless "extras", and undeserved critical acclaim, it's all too obvious that movies requiring more effort to appreciate are too often ignored entirely.

Many recent romance movies have tried to use lavish production values, disaster or crisis settings, trendy techniques such as "non-linear" story-telling, and other such devices to cover up a lack of substance. Movies as different as "Titanic" and "The English Patient" (just to name two of many possible examples) use such methods in an attempt to pass off a romantic couple as heroic or admirable, when the characters in actuality are usually self-absorbed, vapid, and truly less worth caring about than Vigo's Jean and Juliette are.

Jean and Juliette, like most of us, know that they are not important in the grand scheme of things, and they are probably rather well aware of their own weaknesses. They are neither saints nor sinners, neither victims nor heroes, they are just human, and therefore worth caring about. "L'Atalante" itself is not "the greatest movie ever made", especially since there is no such thing anyway, but it is a thoughtful and carefully crafted classic that stays with you well after you have seen it.

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.

"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, such as the young man searching for his sweetheart under water or 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: 9/10

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.