river life
by
Douglas Messerli
Jean Vigo and Albert Riéra (writers, based on an original scenario by Jean Guinée), Jean Vigo (director) L’Atalante (Le Chaland qui passe) / 1934
Jean Vigo’s wonderful film L’Atalante would be his first full-length film, and his last. Because of the late, wet nights he worked filming it, he soon after developed a fever (he had already been suffering from tuberculosis) and died at the age of 29. Moreover, he had fought deep battles with the Gaumont Film Company who were to distribute it. And since he was too ill to cut the final version, the company re-edited it severely and eventually reedited it down to 65 minutes.
The version Criterion now presents is a semi-restored original, which they state in the credits, is as close to the original as possible.
If the film was failure at the time of
its release, today it is recognized as a masterwork. And watching it this
morning, I was touched by its gentle simplicities.
The film has one of the least complex
plots possible. A young couple, Juliette (Dita Parlo) and Jean (Jean Dasté) are
married in a small river town, unforgettably filmed by Vigo, and wind their
way, wedding party behind them, to Jean’s barge waiting along the river bank.
To greet them aboard is John’s assistant, Père Jules (the always memorable
Michel Simon) and the oafish cabin boy (Louis Lefebvre).
Off the couple go, eventually arriving in
Paris, where Jean takes Juliette to a workman’s bar, and where she is greeted
with great fanfare by a local peddler (Gilles Margaritis), who demands she
dance with him in an almost surreal series of events that ends when her jealous
husband drags her back to the barge.
But
having never traveled out of her home village, Juliette sneaks out again, staring
with wonderment into shop windows and simply enjoying the sites. When she
attempts to return to her husband and the barge, she realizes that he, having
discovered her absence, has taken off for the barge’s next destination without
her.
When
she attempts to buy a train ticket to that location, her purse is stolen, and
she is left with no choice but look for work in order to survive.
Meanwhile, Jean, regretting his
decision, sinks into a funk, trying desperately to see her again, in the manner
she claims she has seen him before, in a bucket of water; when that doesn’t
work he jumps into the water to imagine his lover swimming there.
Yet, to repeat the old adage, the
importance of this work is not in the story but in the details. At one point,
as she visits Jules room on the barge, he entertains her with a short but
charming puppet show, also sharing with her his “cabinet of curiosities,” which
includes strange objects he has picked up throughout the world, as well as his tattoos.
Immediately after the barge anchors on the
Seine, he and the cabin boy take off to see a fortuneteller, while Jean, who
has intended to take Juliette for a stroll through the city, is forced to wait
for their return.
Maurice Jaubert’s lively musical score
accompanies all, enlivening an otherwise quiet film with a lack of serious
dialogue. These are not talkative beings, and Simon plays, as usual, a nearly
impossible to comprehend character. To make certain that the audience could
properly hear him, Vigo made Simon repeat each question asked of him before he
might answer.
But it is just that simplicity,
punctuated by the whimsical scenes with the peddler, Jules’ explanation of his
tiny museum, and Jean’s attempt to find the face of his lover in the waters
upon which he earns his living that help to make this film so very loveable. If
living on a barge represents a strange drifting life, nobody quite captured it
so perfectly until Lasse Hallström’s 2000 film, Chocolat, starring Juliette Binoche as a small-town chocolatier and
Johnny Depp as her loving “river rat.”
Los Angeles,
November 9, 2017
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