L’Atatlante

Jean Vigo was cinema’s Mozart and L’Atatlante, a languidly paced romantic comedy, is his inadvertent requiem. Shot on location on canals near Paris during the extraordinarily harsh winter of 1933, Vigo, who was tubercular, exhausted himself and died during post-production. He was only 29 and L’Atalante is his sole feature film. This film, like much important art, is an acquired taste – the movie is slow and has some boring episodes. Vigo hadn’t mastered the rhythms necessary to an 85 minute talkie and the inconsequential, if lyrical, subject matter isn’t always sufficiently involving. But it’s a great picture, nonetheless, profound in surprising ways and contains many astonishing images. The story concerns a young barge captain who marries a provincial girl. The barge captain lives on his vessel with an old man, Pere Jules and a boy (and a tribe of cats cared for by Jules). The couple takes up housekeeping on the barge, immediately quarrel, and, the young wife runs away – her gesture of defiance is misinterpreted by the barge captain who continues the voyage without her. Husband and wife miss one another terribly and the captain is disconsolate. Pere Jules, recognizing that the entire enterprise is in jeopardy, finds the missing wife and brings her back to the barge. Vigo’s approach to this slight material is perpetually surprising – he never films or stages anything the way that you would expect and the effect is often disturbing, Pere Jules is not a loveable old sea-salt; rather, he is a grotesque monster, a kind of ancient merman, imbued with strange, supernatural-seeming powers. The young bride’s relationship to Jules is strange and contains weird erotic implications. At one point, Pere Jules tries to impress the girl by slashing his own hand to show the sharpness of a prized souvenir knife. The young woman, played by the German actress Dita Parlo, is horrified, but also extends her tongue in a cat-like way – as if she intends to lap up the blood flowing from him. In another scene, the bride uses Pere Jules as a mannequin, wrapping a dress around his mid-section. The apparent intent of the scene is to show that the woman’s presence on the barge domesticates and feminizes the men, particularly the grizzled old sailor. But Michel Simon, who plays Jules, does something astonishing with the scene – instead of being humiliated, he seems to embrace the woman’s garment and sashays around the cabin wiggling his hips. (In a later scene, when the captain comments on a pornographic picture of a woman on the wall of Jules’ cabin, the old man says: “Oh that was me, when I was younger.”) Michel Simon, the sacred monster, of French films invests so much imagination into his role that the old sailor becomes the focal point of the film – a kind of microcosm for the entire world and its freakish oddities. Indeed, the movie has the peculiar effect of seeming to open into cosmic vistas – it seems to be about the whole world. When the young couple leaves the church and march in procession to the barge, they surrealistically traverse several different landscapes as if the journey from (Christian) Church to (pagan) waterway encompasses vast space. When Jules finds the young woman – she is listening to a song about barges in a sort of record store – he flings her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes to carry her back to the vessel. There is something uncanny about the bride as well as the old sailor – in fact, the film subtly suggests that they are kindred spirits somehow and that the understanding between them is deeper than the merely erotic passion between the rather callow barge captain and his new wife. Indeed, the wife’s apparently feline ability to “land on her feet” and somehow survive on her own in Paris while the barge continues on to LeHavre, suggests that she has some of the old sailors resourcefulness and resilience, that she is an explorer of uncanny terrain like him. This is a film with endless subtexts and meanings and, yet, apparently, absolutely simple, and, even, banal – and, yet, many shots, particularly the barge emerging from the mist, or bride in her wedding dress, slowly walking along the top of the moving vessel, suggest something strange and, even, unearthly about this voyage.