L'ATALANTE
Reviewed by Harvey Karten New Yorker Films Director: Jean Vigo Writer: Jean Guinee Cast: Michel Simon, Dita Parlo, Jean Daste, Gilles Margaritis, Louis Lefebvre, Maurice Gilles, Raphael Diligent
Paris, the City of Light, center of the world's romance, is no fun at all if you're alone. Few places can be more downright depressing if you are not in the company of your significant other. Utilizing this motif in making only one film of more than 47 minutes in length, Jean Vigo established a reputation as one of the world's great directors with "L'Atalante," a poignant story of love's labor's lost for several dire hours in the streets of Paris, a work which is considered by top critics to be among the top hundred films of the twentieth century, a classic of the genre.
Whether the average guy on the street or even the more prescient critic would agree is not as obvious as it may seem. The film uses techniques that are dated, even hackneyed when looked at through the eyes of moviegoers sixty-six years after its conception--which was just seven years after the silver screen began to talk. Even allowing for that, one may well wonder what all the hysteria is about.
Sure, the story can touch the lives and pierce the heartstrings of most film buffs beyond the age of thirty, who-- if they had not spent their lives in the Lascaux caves or an ashram in Benares--have loved and lost, terribly hurt by relationships gone sour. Doubtless these adults have fretted for months, even years, in grief over the ruins of what have been: "I said something wrong/Now I long for yesterday." How, though, to explain the critic Hal Hinson of the Washington Post who wrote in 1990, "Rapt, exuberant and as fragile as mist, this passionate tone poem drifts in its own bubble of oddly dissonant, almost fatalistic romanticism." Hinson, a fine writer, seems more in love with his own muse than with the alleged transcendence of "L'Atalante."
The admittedly simple story, one which like the Greek tragedies follows the unity of plot, is of two fragile people in love and the strapping, yet worldly orangutan of a man whose common sense and deeply imbedded soft spot help to bring them together when they go astray. Vigo opens on a wedding party in the streets of a small French village, Boris Kaufman panning his camera across a group of typically insular peasants who either grumble that the newlyweds are too cheap to follow their nuptials with a grand bouffe or that the girl should have married a local instead of the captain of a small river barge, L'Atalante." The bride, Juliette (Dita Parlo), has too many stars in her eyes to settle for small-town life and thrills in anticipation of docking in Paris, a city she has never seen. Her groom, Jean (Jean Daste), does not share her passion for urban beauty but is content enough doing the routine chores on the boat--and even then, he seems to accumulate a year's worth of laundry before putting the clothes through the ringer. With Juliette bored out of her skull, the honeymoon seems over, as in fact the marriage would have been were it not for the common sense of the ship's roguish mate, Pere Jules (the wonderful Michel Simon), whose love for a plethora of cats exceeds his regard for the simple-minded cabin boy (Louis Lefevre). As we watch the crew together with its new guest going through their daily chores in cramped quarters, we in the audience cannot help asking the predictable question, "Are we there yet?"
When the ship finally docks in Paris, life changes for the couple--for the worse. As Juliette connects with a vaudevillian peddler, brightening as he performs magic in a tavern and then sweeps the bride into a dance, Jean fumes enough to leave his mate behind and set sail without her. As the abandoned Juliette despairs, Jean has second thoughts. In the film's most ardent scenes, one blending lyricism and the surreal with a preponderant gruff realism, the despondent couple each try to manage the depression that overtakes them once they realize how lost they are, alone in a hostile or, at best, indifferent world.
The film was mutilated by its producers, who cut the 89 minutes down to barely more than 60, arguing that a box office demanding entertainment would not accept the grim realities portrayed on the screen. If the bean counters sought simply to maximum their profits, they would not be entirely wrong for the mangling. The mainstream public in the United States today would scarcely be more drawn to this dreamlike fare which moves along at its own pace, more intent on portraying ambience than on thrilling with a dramatic story, the cinematic equivalent of a dreamy Debussy tone poem rather than a stormy Beethoven symphony.
If we were intent on oversimplifying we could compress the motif of the film to the contemporary aphorism, "Don't ask too hard for what you want. You may get it." Juliette is of the spirits. Ground down by the tedium of town life and the monotony of gliding in a battered barge, she longs for the excitement of Paris. She finds it only to realize that without the embrace of her man, the city offers nothing but ephemeral temptations and adorned corruption. Jean, who is by contrast too bound to his daily routine, discovers that without the transcendence that only his lover can provide, life is meaningless at best, and downright painful--manifest in the movie's most erotic scene that display both Jean and Juliette tossing in their lonely beds during one aching night of separation.
Vigo has created a dreamworld which may well have been innovative--but only for its time. He has encouraged us in the audience to look inside our hearts to determine what really matters. Surely "L'Atalante" does not perform these praiseworthy designs in a unique manner, so that one wonders exactly why this meritorious enough film is lauded by so many critics above virtually all others of the genre.
Not Rated. Running time: 89 minutes. (C) 2000 by Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com
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