Pauline Kael told us that "L'Atalante" was one of those films that are more pleasurable in the memory than while seeing it. Maybe so, but not for me. I knew I was witnessing a masterpiece after the first thirty seconds.
There was not a false step in the whole thing, and many wonderful surprises. There's a brief flash of strange eroticism when Dita Parlo sticks out her tongue at Michel Simon, the old seaman who runs the boat (and I can't even remember why she did it). There's some comedy, with an astoundingly nimble Vaudeville-like cafe performer/one-man-band who serenades Parlo, to her husband's dismay. There's aching heartbreak, with the separated lovers who long for each other so much that it wakes them up in the night and hear each other's yearning. And after all those things, the sensuality, the humor, and the tragedy, the movie just dreams on by as smooth and as fragile as a film can be. I fell in love with it the same way I did with "The Third Man"--the heedless, foolish romanticism just got to me in the end.
There was not a false step in the whole thing, and many wonderful surprises. There's a brief flash of strange eroticism when Dita Parlo sticks out her tongue at Michel Simon, the old seaman who runs the boat (and I can't even remember why she did it). There's some comedy, with an astoundingly nimble Vaudeville-like cafe performer/one-man-band who serenades Parlo, to her husband's dismay. There's aching heartbreak, with the separated lovers who long for each other so much that it wakes them up in the night and hear each other's yearning. And after all those things, the sensuality, the humor, and the tragedy, the movie just dreams on by as smooth and as fragile as a film can be. I fell in love with it the same way I did with "The Third Man"--the heedless, foolish romanticism just got to me in the end.