There are days (many of them) when I think this is the best movie I've ever seen. It is a deceptively simple story, an old story--boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-and-girl-get-back-together--told in a pictorial language that is at once wholly natural and very, very strange.
E.M. Forster defined a story as two events separated by time; Vigo discovered a perfectly cinematic style of thinking about time and our movement through it that captures the sense of reverie at the edge of consciousness, the awareness of the drift and accretion of moments that become our lives--become us--and he made that sensibility the medium of his narrative. It is a style that foregrounds the the interstices and caesuras of the story, which paradoxically makes the events all the more telling.
But this all sounds as if L'Atalante were high metaphysics or painfully abstruse modern art. It's neither, of course; as so many have said here, it's simply beautiful--charming, erotic, light as a snatch of song heard in the open air, wonderfully, frankly sentimental yet shadowed by equally frank carnality and even danger. The mixture is intoxicating--and necessary. Of course Michel Simon's character is annoying and disturbing; so is Autolycus in "The Winter's Tale," and so are Trinculo and Stephano in "The Tempest." Vigo, like Shakespeare, knew that magic and romance need a bit of coarse earth to work their spells properly.
One reason L'Atalante escapes cinematic pedantry is Vigo's admirable attitude toward the characters in this tale: He respects them. Too many filmmakers (the Coen brothers come to mind) seem to treat the characters in their films as playthings to manipulate and make interesting pictures around. What happens to them is a function of genre, or of the director's interpretation of what genre might require, or of some other formula, rather than of the director's sense of life and of the lives lived in the internally coherent world of the film. This is more than a difference of style; it is a moral difference, as the young rebel Vigo surely knew. By honoring the true love his awkward young newlyweds are sure they've found, then lost, then rediscovered somehow altered, deepened, rendered more fragile and precious--Vigo strikes a lasting blow for the dignity and irreducibility of the individual human lover. THAT'S a revolution.
E.M. Forster defined a story as two events separated by time; Vigo discovered a perfectly cinematic style of thinking about time and our movement through it that captures the sense of reverie at the edge of consciousness, the awareness of the drift and accretion of moments that become our lives--become us--and he made that sensibility the medium of his narrative. It is a style that foregrounds the the interstices and caesuras of the story, which paradoxically makes the events all the more telling.
But this all sounds as if L'Atalante were high metaphysics or painfully abstruse modern art. It's neither, of course; as so many have said here, it's simply beautiful--charming, erotic, light as a snatch of song heard in the open air, wonderfully, frankly sentimental yet shadowed by equally frank carnality and even danger. The mixture is intoxicating--and necessary. Of course Michel Simon's character is annoying and disturbing; so is Autolycus in "The Winter's Tale," and so are Trinculo and Stephano in "The Tempest." Vigo, like Shakespeare, knew that magic and romance need a bit of coarse earth to work their spells properly.
One reason L'Atalante escapes cinematic pedantry is Vigo's admirable attitude toward the characters in this tale: He respects them. Too many filmmakers (the Coen brothers come to mind) seem to treat the characters in their films as playthings to manipulate and make interesting pictures around. What happens to them is a function of genre, or of the director's interpretation of what genre might require, or of some other formula, rather than of the director's sense of life and of the lives lived in the internally coherent world of the film. This is more than a difference of style; it is a moral difference, as the young rebel Vigo surely knew. By honoring the true love his awkward young newlyweds are sure they've found, then lost, then rediscovered somehow altered, deepened, rendered more fragile and precious--Vigo strikes a lasting blow for the dignity and irreducibility of the individual human lover. THAT'S a revolution.