After many years of hearing about "L'Atalante", I was finally able to see the restored version last night, and it is everything people said about it. The director, Jean Vigo (who also filmed Zero de Conduite, the source for "If"), was dying of tuberculosis during the filming, and died the week before the film opened (1934). It was subsequently cut to ribbons by an unsympathetic studio, and was only painstakingly reassembled in 1990. What makes it such a great film is the feeling throughout that the world is strange and new -- Vigo's anarchist strain somehow works its way into the vision of the film.

The story is simple, mythical: a girl in a village along the Seine marries a barge captain, and they sail off together towards Paris. Trouble ensues -- the barge is cramped, the husband is uncertain, there are dancehalls enroute, and there is a radio that beckons "Paris calling". The new wife abandons ship in Paris, and the rest of the film is about the myth of possible loss and return.

Everything in the film is fresh and beautiful, as if no one had ever made a film before, so it has a clumsy innocence and energy as well. There are scenes of such beauty that the heart stops -- the bride in her wedding dress walking down the roof of the sooty barge, the fog draping the Seine, crazy music boxes, junkyards, rubble. More than anything however, the film creates its own deep archtypal myths: something deep about a barge on a river, riverbanks of other worlds, sunlight on water, the magic of a sailor's many voyages, and some inner connection between the two lovers that hoops them together, even though apart. Like most great things, there is a kind of sadness in L'Atalante as well, as if everything truly beautiful is tinged with the potential for loss, and the myth helps us cope with that in some unknown way.

I see that it is now on DVD -- if you like old movies, and French old movies in particular, L'Atalante is in the same league as Les Enfants du Paradis, and Regle de Jeu -- no faint praise.

yours,

Peter T.