L'Atalante

1934 romance

Rating: 18/20

Plot: Newlyweds live on the barge the husband captains with a first mate and a cabin boy. They have early marriage troubles.

If I have a movie goal for 2019, it's to fill in some embarrassing gaps in my movie watching and see some movies that I probably should have seen a long time ago. This Jean Vigo romantic comedy is one of those, and I'm glad I watched it because it's just lovely.

Part of my trepidation with any movie from the 1930's is an assumption that the movie's score will be oppressive, but I liked the score here. I was hooked initially when some ringing church bells worked their way into the score, a scene where the newlyweds are walking from the church to the dock while onlookers follow to wish them a hilariously apathetic farewell.

The boat itself might be a sort of metaphor for the voyage of marriage. At the very least, the clash between the husband's desire to be on the river and the wife's desire to explore the sights on land are a good representation of the kinds of conflict that can get in the way of people just being in love. Gorgeous shots of fog and boat clutter are visuals representations of just how lost young lovers can be.

With a romantic story like this, you'd expect the married couple to be at the center of this, and they are. But that doesn't happen at the expense of a third character, the first mate Jules who is played by Michel Simon. He's a great character, one with all sorts of untold backstory and relationships with the other characters that are almost impossible to pin down. When you meet him, you think he's going to be a dumb brute of a character and largely background, kind of like the cabin boy ends up being. Instead, he's integral. And I'll tell you--he's one sexy beast of a boatman! I mean, when he's showing Juliette the contents of his cluttered cabin, his knickknacks collected from around the world, and says, "I'll show you my puppet," I swooned. These souvenirs from all over the world are things that could each have their own story, and spin-off films detailing the misadventures of Jules would have been worth making. Jules is a character who has possibly loved, maybe even loved and lost, but those are the kinds of details you have to figure out for yourself.

"I'll show you my puppet." Swoon!

There are some beautiful shots in this thing. At various stages, you get to see a montage with all three characters on their own search for something, and those shots are just wonderful. Vigo also makes this clunker of a ship feel like the most romantic place on earth at some points, and there's a scene near the end that almost approaches a kind of magical realism with some double-exposure shots that I really liked.