L' Atalante

Starring:Michel Simon, Dita Parlo, Jean DastÃ©, Gilles Margaritis, Louis Lefebvre, Maurice Gilles, RaphaÃ«l Diligent, Genya Lozinska, Paul Grimault, Gen Paul, Fanny Clar, Pierre PrÃ©vert, RenÃ© Blech, Charles Goldblatt, Claude Aveline, Jacques PrÃ©vert, Lou Tchimoukoff, Albert RiÃ©ra
Director: Jean Vigo
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com

The story is so simple, it hardly exists: a young girl marries a mate aboard a river barge named L'Atalante; she grows bored and frustrated with the dull life that results; when the barge docks in Paris, she runs away, only to discover that she misses her husband. But the power of L'Atalante isn't in its story--it's in the way the camera captures the world in rich, dreamy images, steeping the audience in a viewpoint both innocent and stark. The simplest things are also implacable and confusing. The characters' personalities, and the ways they conflict, have the deep frustrations of real life, and not the easily resolved plot points of most romances. The culmination will leave you aching with happiness and lingering sorrow. Director Jean Vigo--who died of lung disease after completing the film--had an astonishing ability to make the real world translucent; cinematographer Boris Kaufman said, "He used everything around him: the sun, the moon, snow, night. Instead of fighting unfavorable conditions, he made them play a part." This film is a masterpiece, comparable to Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali or the movies of Robert Bresson in its ability to be simultaneously effortless and devastatingly complex. --Bret Fetzer

Description

This intoxicatingly inventive masterpiece- a perennial entry on best-of-all-time lists- is one of the world's great films. Jean Vigo's innovative style transforms a simple and engaging plot of a young woman's stormy initiation into married life on a river barge, into a kaleidoscope of dazzling digressions and offbeat characterizations complete with tour-de-force scenes that still seem fresh and startling.

Jean, the young captain of the barge L'ATALANTE, marries Juliette, a village girl who has never left home before. They sail away together along with a cabin boy and the colorful sailor Pere Jules, played by Michel Simon - in a legendary, uproarious and unpredictable performance forming the very heart of Vigo's magical, anarchic universe. Becoming bored, Juliette slips off the ship to discover the delights of Paris- forcing Jean into heartbreak.

Restored in 2001, this version of the film aims to be as faithful to the original as possible. Viewers can once again enjoy the luminous beauty of Boris Kaufman's evocative cinematography and the marvelous music of Maurice Jaubert in Jean Vigo's triumphant masterpiece as it was meant to be seen.

Customer Reviews:

L'Atalante.......2007-06-20

A sublime melding of the real and surreal, the deceptively simple plot of Jean Vigo's "L'Atalante" is part of its lasting appeal. Life on water is Eden, life on land, temptation, and we instinctively want the sanctity of Jean and Juliette's love upheld. An acknowledged masterpiece, "L'Atalante" still floats gracefully, with actor Michel Simon stealing the picture as Pere Jules, the barge's eccentric, cantankerous first-mate. Sadly, this was the gifted Vigo's only full-length feature; he died shortly after its release, at age 29.

a cruddy print.......2007-05-06

Well, I'm halfway decent at French, so when I buy big French classics like this the first thing I take a gander at is the subtitle situation. Here, only English is possible, not French or any other language. There are also no dubs into other languages.

Fortunately, however, while the letters of the subtitles are white, the letters sport tiny black borders, allowing them to remain legible even when they appear against a whitish backdrop, such as snow or a bridal dress.

Why doesn't everybody just make yellow subtitles? Sheesh!

Anyhow. The extras are lame: you get to see a gallery of posters for the film and a bevy of still shots.

In short, what you're gettng is essentially the movie in DVD format, but nothing more worth mentioning. Don't be led into thinking this is a revolutionary transfer or anything. I can't see how anyone could feel that way.

To See Paris and ..........2007-04-09

"People are strange when you are stranger

Faces look ugly when you're alone

Women seem wicked when you are unwanted

Streets are uneven when you are down..." by Jim Morrsion (1963-1971)

...And city of light and love is dark and depressing when you are there without your beloved.

Director Jean Vigo died young (at 29, of septicemia) just after he finished his third and last film, "L'Atalante" which is one of the screen's great romances, about a young barge captain Jean (Jean Daste), who takes his bride Juliette (Dita Parlo) to live aboard his boat. They are in love, they fight, she disappears to see Paris, he goes searching for her, can not find her, they are both desperate and miserable until the first mate (Michel Simon in a superb comical performance) decides to find her and bring her back...

The film has many magical moments - one of them is the movie's most erotic scene that display both Jean and Juliette tossing in their lonely beds during one aching night of separation searching for each other, longing for each other, realizing how painful and meaningless life is without the one they love.

Vigo knew that he was dying - "I am killing myself with L'Atalante", he said. His death at 29 is one of the cinema's great losses. We can only imagine what masterpieces he could've created. L'Atalante with its simple compelling story, humanity, intense, lyrical romanticism and candid eroticism shows that Vigo was a visionary and experimentalist of outstanding quality.

Filmmakers as diverse as Francois Truffaut and Lindsay Anderson have acknowledged Vigos's influence on their work.

Highly recommended: 4.5/5

Absorbing and fun........2007-03-05

L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934)

Jean Vigo made only two feature films before his premature death in 1934. L'Atalante was the second of them, and as a testament both to the potential Jean Vigo had to become the world's finest filmmaker of the time and the small legacy he left behind, I doubt anyone could have asked for a better tombstone.

The story ostensibly concerns Jean (Jean Daste, who probably appears in more films on They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?'s Top 1000 Films than any other actor) and Juliette (The Grand Illusion's Dita Parlo), opening with their marriage and the beginning of their life on Jean's barge. And the movie does concern itself with Jean and Juliette's rocky marriage, it's true, but said marriage seems more a way for Vigo and co-writers Jean Guinee and Albert Riera to introduce Juliette to interesting people and situations. Perhaps the most interesting of these is Jean's first mate (Boudu Saved from Drowning's Michel Simon, in one of the finest roles in a career filled with great ones), a wise, if somewhat crazy, old man who's obsessed with cats. Simon effortlessly steals every scene he's in-- which, given the quality of the cast, is nothing short of amazing.

This is not to say that the relationship between Jean and Juliette is a minor consideration. Unlike Carne's Children of Paradise, where the story is a convenient launching pad for Carne and Prevert's explorations of nineteenth-century Paris, we never lose sight of our main characters here for very long. The story is a simple one-- boy marries girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl again-- but Vigo, when he's not spinning amusing side stories, invests Jean and Juliette with a passion rare in the repressive thirties. (Derek Malcolm quotes Alfred Bazin saying of Vigo that he had an "almost obscene taste for flesh.") Reportedly, this mirrors the marriage of Vigo and his wife Elizabeth; upon Vigo's death, it is said, she had to be restrained from jumping out a window to her own. How could someone in that kind of a relationship not have an almost obscene taste for flesh, I ask you?

L'Atalante is a feast for the mind and the senses. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder why Jean Vigo isn't a household name. (And why he wasn't at the time of his death, either.) More than anything, though, you'll simply enjoy it. **** ½

Beauty in its simplicity; what a truly wonderful film.......2007-01-20

I normally deplore sentimental story-telling, but having just seen "L'Atalante" for the first time, I fully understand why this is ranked amongst the greatest films ever made. Straightforward & simple in its approach, with a minimal amount of dialogue, this movie still has an impact which anyone should be able to experience, even today.

Anyone who has suffered the trials of a new marriage can relate to Jean & Juliette, who both stumble early & badly, and suffer all the more because they realize they have made really poor decisions. The moment where Juliette returns to the moorings, only to find that the barge has left without her --- leaving an inexperienced country girl at the mercy of the big city --- has to be one of the most heart-rending moments I have ever watched in a movie. How magnificently done!

Michel Simon is quite amazing as Pere Jules, truly one of the most eccentric characters ever created on film. Simon does such a great performance as a drunk that I would not be surprised if he actually had tossed back a few before filming the scene.

How disheartening it is to know that nothing else would be forthcoming from the comsumptive Jean Vigo, dead at only age 29. But what a relief it is to know that this movie, which very nearly didn't survive intact, is still with us to be enjoyed.

Average customer rating:

L'Atalante
a cruddy print
To See Paris and ...
Absorbing and fun.
Beauty in its simplicity; what a truly wonderful film

L' Atalante
Starring: Michel Simon , Dita Parlo , Jean Dasté , Gilles Margaritis , and Louis Lefebvre
Director: Jean Vigo
Manufacturer: New Yorker Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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