Main Cast: Dita Parlo, Jean Dasté, Michel Simon, Louis Lefebvre, Gilles Margaritis
Release Year: 1934
Country: FR
Run Time: 82 minutes
Plot
The most acclaimed (and sentimental) film in Jean Vigo's short career. L'Atalante is the name of the barge owned by Jean (Jean Daste), who marries the lovely Juliette (Dita Parlo) at the film's beginning. Juliette comes to live aboard the barge, for Jean makes his living on the Seine. The arrival of a woman on board disrupts the small crew, but they do their best to make her welcome. The solitude and boredom soon take their toll on Juliette, so Jean brings her ashore for a night at a cafe in Paris. He becomes jealous of a flirtation between Juliette and a peddler, and when she leaves the ship again later, Jean casts off from the port. This dark love story is also peppered with hallucinations and unusual camerawork. A restored version was made available in 1990. ~ John Voorhees, All Movie Guide
Review
In his only full-length feature, released shortly before he died at age 29, Jean Vigo led the way for the French poetic realist style, deriving poignant beauty from the drab reality of a couple's marital problems while they live on a river barge. Beginning with their on-shore wedding and near-surreal, low-angle walk to the barge across barren fields, Vigo turns the ups and downs of the couple's mundane existence into rapturously dreamlike visual interludes interspersed with moments of humor and grotesquerie from the barge's other two inhabitants. Expressively shot by Boris Kaufman, the cramped quarters, the river's fog, and the industrial riverfront wastelands complement the struggle between Dita Parlo's bride and Jean Dasté's skipper/husband as they adapt to married life; underwater shots and superimpositions lyrically evoke their anguish after a separation. The catalogue of the cat-loving first mate (Michel Simon)'s eccentric international souvenirs underlines the freedom afforded by barge life. Unmoved by Vigo's artistic bravery, the producers mutilated L'Atalante in 1934; censors banned it anyway. Finally restored to its original form in 1989, L'Atalante was voted one of the ten best films of the 20th century in a 1999 Village Voice critics' poll. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
L'Atalante (also released as Le chaland qui passe) is a 1934Frenchfilm directed by Jean Vigo and starring Jean Dasté, Dita Parlo and Michel Simon. It has been hailed by many critics as one of the greatest films of all time.
Jean (Jean Dasté), captain of the canal barge L'Atalante, has a new wife, Juliette (Dita Parlo). They are married, having hardly met, in Juliette's provincial town. The opening sequence — the newlyweds' march from the church to Jean's boat — is filmed in a discontinuous style that anticipates the films of the French New Wave.
The couple embark on a trip between Le Havre and Paris which functions doubly as a cargo delivery and as their makeshift honeymoon. Tensions arise with the crew, who are not used to the presence of a woman. Most of the conflict, however, stems from Jean who flies into a jealous rage, smashing plates and sending cats scattering every which way, when he discovers Juliette and first mate Jules (Michel Simon), an obsessive cat lover, talking in the latter's quarters.
Arriving in Paris, Jean and Juliette go to a music club. There they meet a street peddler who flirts with Juliette leading to a scuffle with Jean. Growing disaffected with barge life and enamored with the lights of Paris, Juliette runs off. Jean, furious, casts off, leaving her behind. He becomes very depressed so that Jules decides to look for her and bring her back.
Raphaël Diligent — Raspoutine, le batelier (as Rafa Diligent)
Production and release
The film's much-lauded cinematography was by Boris Kaufman, the brother of Soviet film maker Dziga Vertov. He would later go on to shoot Hollywood films such as On the Waterfront (1954). He described his years working with Vigo as "cinematic paradise."
The original distributors cut the film's running time to 65 minutes in an attempt to make it more popular and changed the title to Le chaland qui passe ("The Passing Barge"), the name of a song from the time, which was also inserted into the film. The film was restored to 89 minutes in 1990 in a version released on videotape. The entire film was restored in a version released on DVD in 2001.
Reception and influence
The film has been praised for its prescient poetic realist style. Upon its release, the French art historianElie Faure found the film "classical, almost violent and always tormented, fevered, overflowing with ideas and with fantasy; truculent; a virulent and even demonical romanticism that still remains humanistic."
The film became a favorite of the filmmakers of the French New Wave, whose films contain many allusions to Vigo's work. The French director Francois Truffaut fell in love with it when he saw it at age 14 in 1946: "When I entered the theater, I didn't even know who Jean Vigo was. I was immediately overwhelmed with wild enthusiasm for his work."
Yugoslavian film director Emir Kusturica has said he is a big admirer of Vigo's work and describes Vigo as a poet. This admiration is best shown in Kusturica's Underground, where the underwater scenes are very reminiscent of those from L'Atalante.[1]
L'Atalante was chosen as the 10th-greatest film of all time in British journal Sight & Sound's 1962 poll, and as the 6th-best in its 1992 poll. It is also director Jim Jarmusch's favorite film ever, according to 2002 Sight & Sound's poll. [2]
