L’Atalante
(1934, Jean Vigo; Criterion spine #578, from The Complete Jean Vigo)
It’s startling to consider that this, Vigo’s only full-length film after two shorts that jabbed at the establishment, wasn’t even a project he wanted to do. It was what a studio offered him and his financial backer, a corny script with a mildly interesting conceit: What if a village girl were to be swept off her feet by a young barge captain floating through town, ran away from her family, and found herself adjusting to married life on a tiny boat with a salty first mate, a foolish cabin boy, and innumerable feral cats and kittens sharing her impossibly tiny personal space? Vigo himself was apparently highly dubious. And then he shot off from that hackneyed idea and created an utter masterpiece, beloved by romantics and cynics alike, studied frame-by-frame by filmmakers ever since. He did this with a handful of extremely talented collaborators, sure, but he also was working under a death sentence, passing away from tuberculosis at 29 just as the film was nearing its final edit.
A good older foreign movie is worthy of respect and study, but this reaches across 80 years and grabs you, laughing, by both shoulders. Yes, part of this stems from inescapable awareness of the tragedy of Vigo’s short life, but it’s more than that — the visual experimentation, the palpable joy of the actors (especially mate Michel Simon and bride Dita Parlo), the satisfying story beats; it all feels completely modern, possibly because great filmmakers have been continually inspired by Vigo across decades. It’s an incredibly simple story once Parlo is on the boat with new husband Jean Dasté: She makes the best of the cramped conditions, with some of the inconvenience salved by the balm of new love; a rare trip ashore with Dasté proves that he’s a touch less social than she; and when she ventures off the boat again for some innocent fun alone, her new husband, jealous, steams off without her. Simon, with whom she’s bonded earlier, conspires to find her and bring her back. That’s it — the complications hardly rise to the level of a sitcom episode. But the details are what makes the film unforgettable, especially Simon. His Père Jules is an unruly, profane force of nature, the source of most of the comedy and a lot of the heart of the show, and the bits are inspired even when viewed today; for example, the circa-2011 meme of table flipping (where a person turns over a table to stop a game in progress when it’s not going their way) makes an appearance here.
Clearly this is a key film about marriage, turning the universal fear about binding your life with someone else’s and losing your own sense of identity into an externalized situation — the barge. The ways in which Vigo shows us both ineffable joy and simultaneous uncertainty are immensely clever: the newlyweds exult in just holding each other, alternately embracing and looking into each other’s eyes, in long takes that encourage us to forget about actors acting and believe that the emotions are real; the husband stalks his bride abovedeck like a cat; and at one point they fall into a game where they are back to back and trying to lift the other off the ground. It’s foolish and silly on the one hand, and yet that very ridiculousness makes it seem even truer. Parlo loves the romance of the boat but you can see how she begins to long for just a little time onshore; Dasté clearly wants to indulge her but it’s also obvious that he’s uncomfortable with the crowds and gaiety at the nightclub he takes her to, and only breathes easy when he’s back. It’s easy to criticize the movie for not having an operatic plot or giant emotional incidents, but that completely misses what’s happening: the tiny, universal adjustments and disappointments that any relationship forces, the inevitable arguments and the self-righteousness that each spouse feels, the shock of realizing that your life is already starting to bind to another’s and that walking away doesn’t bring any relief, and the comfort that can result if these compromises are made and embraced — this is what Vigo has, miraculously, put on the screen.
Reminds me of:
So continuing the point above, the relationship-commitment aspect of this story reminded me of my favorite (to date) movie-marriage-metaphor, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna). Granted, L’Atalante is scrupulously realistic and not a fantastical metaphor — in Woman, the male character is literally trapped at the bottom of an ever-growing sand pit by his initial impulse to help a stranger — but there is a similar full-force recognition of what marriage feels like and what it becomes over time.
Having seen the lethal-love-triangle-on-a-barge movie Young Adam back in 2003 (with Tilda Swinton having her head turned from lout husband Peter Mullan to the younger lout Ewan McGregor), there’s no way for me to avoid mentioning the connection. (Writer/director David Mackenzie names the barge “Atlantic Eve”; is he cynically connecting the loveless Swinton/Mullan marriage to an imagined fate of the Parlo/Dasté characters, the “eve” of their relationship?) Young Adam is also a fine movie but it could not be more different in tone; where it uses the confined barge spaces for dread and as a metaphor for imprisonment, L’Atalante compares the same spaces to the willfully entered “prison” of a relationship.
This is another one of those early sound movies where sound is an integral part of the plot — I’m thinking of Lang’s M, with the killer’s whistling, or even the stomach-gurgling gag in Chaplin’s Modern Times. In this case, while Parlo is having her “lost weekend” walkabout in the city, her desire to listen to “Song of the Bargemen” leads her to a public record parlor, where her song choice playing over the speakers on the street leads Simon to her in turn. And of course one of the film’s best and most modern gags — which works just as well now as it ever has — finds Simon running his index finger along a record’s grooves in his cabin, sadly and nostalgically, as we hear the strains of the music rise on the soundtrack — only to realize on the reverse shot that the cabin boy is playing an accordion on the bunk opposite. That’s a sophisticated joke, and one made less than a decade after movie sound had been invented.
And here’s one that was brain-twisting for me, at least: When I was preparing my stills for this #WTW post, I was struck at how often I found myself wanting to pair the pictures up, to show how a shot flowed or how one commented on the previous. Then other pairs which I hadn’t captured jumped to mind, like the payoff of the Pere Jules record player scene, or the panning shots along the barge, or the famous cross-cutting of the separated spouses tossing and turning in two different beds. I haven’t had this impulse with the stills from any of the prior films, which made me wonder: Maybe this tells us something about Vigo? An uncanny sense of visual flow? An ability to think in terms of serial shots and how their presentation affects the audience?
And all of a sudden I remembered something that I hadn’t thought about in years: One of my personal seminal moments of film awareness happened when I was very young, a pre-teen; I was a voracious reader and my local library allowed me to hang out and browse in the adult stacks (thank you, Ms. Sandy the children’s librarian!). Somehow I got my hands on Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art. If you know that book — still one of the most important reference works for film, and I bought my own copy as an adult — you know why I don’t keep it lying around for my own three kids to find; it is a full list of avant-garde and disruptive works of world cinema up to that date (1973), illustrated with copious stills, many of a disturbing nature. My own adult quest to seek out (and own) great classics is highly informed by Vogel, even though I often forget that fact. (I’m sure it will come up again as #WTW continues.) At any rate, I suddenly realized where I’d run into Vigo originally, and forgotten: in Vogel, and branded on my 12-year-old mind’s eye forever, is a still from his first film À propos de Nice, a sly “documentary” of the French town of Nice that’s really an acerbic commentary disguised as a sunny “city film.” In that short, as the various silent shots of life in Nice begin to turn satirical, there’s a “ladies’ fashion” segment in which we see a matronly woman modeling her of-the-moment outfit, lounging in a deck chair. Vigo then cross-fades into a shot of the model wearing another outfit, then another and another. At the end of the sequence, the final fade is into the woman sitting completely naked. There’s no narration or titles in the movie, but Vigo’s intent is clear — it’s a joke on the rich and fashionable, an “emperor-has-no-clothes” riff (hmm, one repeated wholesale in Altman’s problematic Prêt-à-Porter from 1994, now that I think about it). And in the Vogel book, to lead off the chapter “International Left and Revolutionary Cinema” (p. 120), he’s selected two stills from À propos — one with and one sans clothing. It’s probably the only film in the book that gets two stills. So I might have good company in my inability to distill Vigo into a single image.
Note that I’m not mentioning Vigo’s other masterpiece because I’ve already decided — about two seconds after L’Atalante ended — to rewatch Zéro de conduite again as soon as possible for a #WTW. The anarchy present in a film like Zéro clearly influenced many other films, but with L’Atalante there’s a sublimely light touch and fewer obvious elements to copy. (That said, I see some Wes Anderson borrowings in his films’ collections of stuff, most obviously from Père Jules’s cabin crammed full of signifying objects, right up to a puppet theater.)
Note that I’m not mentioning Vigo’s other masterpiece because I’ve already decided — about two seconds after L’Atalante ended — to rewatch Zéro de conduite again as soon as possible for a #WTW. The anarchy present in a film like Zéro clearly influenced many other films, but with L’Atalante there’s a sublimely light touch and fewer obvious elements to copy. (That said, I see some Wes Anderson borrowings in his films’ collections of stuff, most obviously from Père Jules’s cabin crammed full of signifying objects, right up to a puppet theater.)
But then — the guilt!
This is one of those movies where if you had told me that no one in it was a professional actor, I’d have believed it, especially Michel Simon. But of course that’s ludicrous — Simon is one of the great French actors of his time. Yet in part of my brain Père Jules actually lived on a barge in the 1930’s and is probably still there, grumping up and down the canal, sticking a kitten or two on his shoulders and cuffing the cabin boy. He literally strips to show Parlo his life of misadventure, mapped out in terribly crude, touchingly naive tattoos on his body. How could this man just be acting? But of course he was, and it was only when I was looking up some facts for this piece that I realized I’ve seen him and all the others before: Simon and Parlo are in The Grand Illusion; Dasté is in Zéro de conduite; he and Simon are in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, and so on. I’ll be watching for these folks the next time I see these other films (but I won’t be surprised if I don’t recognize them)!
Pitch:
Wow, this is just a beautiful film. David Thomson is quoted all over the web (from his 2008 book “Have You Seen…?”) as having called it “not so much a masterpiece as a definition of cinema.” It’s poetry transformed into sound and images. I don’t think it matters at all whether a given person cares to experience L’Atalante for themselves, because even if they “don’t like” old or foreign or French or recovered or subtitled or black-and-white or romantic or (deceptively) simple films, whatever it is they do think they “like” is inherently informed by Vigo’s work, defined (as Thomson indicates) by it. Inescapably. Watch Parlo’s face fall as she sees the barge for the first time, forlornly standing at the bank in her wedding dress; then watch her clown and flirt around with her new husband; then watch her stride along the barge on that first day in the sun; you are watching the essence of what movies are for.
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