L'Atalante movie review & film summary (1934)

After Jean climbs back on board, the old man and the cabin boy try to cheer him with music, but he wanders off and, in a heartbreaking shot, embraces a block of ice as if it is his love.

Juliette is played by Dita Parlo, a legendary Berlin-born actress who made 22 films between 1928 and 1939, and one more in 1965. Her other famous role was as the farm woman who takes in the escaped convicts in Renoir's "Grand Illusion" (1937). Madonna's bookSexwas inspired, she said, by Parlo in "L'Atalante." Garboesque in the pale refinement of her face, she seems too elegant to be an untraveled country girl, but that quality works when it is set beside Michel Simon's crusty old Jules.

Simon, not yet 40 when the film was made, looks 60, weathered by salt air and pickled in seaport saloons. Inspired by the sight of the two young lovers kissing, he has his best moment when he demonstrates how he can wrestle, too--and grapples with himself on the deck, while Vigo dissolves between exposures to make him into two lonely ghosts fighting for possession of the same body.

Jean Daste, who plays Jean, conveys the helplessness of a young man who knows he is in love but knows nothing about the practical side of a relationship--how he must see Juliette's needs and intuit what wounds her. Although the film ends with everyone joyously back on board, we doubt, somehow, that we have seen their last fight.

The movie's look is softly poetic. Vigo and his cinematographer, Boris Kaufman, who years later labored for Preminger in Hollywood, shot mostly on location, capturing the cold winter canal landscapes, the smoky bistros, the cramped living quarters, the magnificence of the muscular old barge as water pours into locks to lift it up to Paris. This is the kind of movie you return to like a favorite song, remembering where you were and how it made you feel, and how its feet smelled.