Jean Vigo (1934)
Michel Simon is a fine and highly individual actor who gets on my nerves in a way that few others do. His best-known part is probably the title role in Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning: Simon plays the tramp who exposes to ridicule the decent but condescending intentions of the bourgeois trying to turn Boudu into something socially respectable. Actors carry their past roles with them and, because Boudu was my first experience of Simon, whenever I see him on screen I seem to sniff him too. Reviewers will sometimes praise the complete realisation of a place and atmosphere by saying ‘you can almost smell the …’ I’ll have to be honest about L’Atalante: it was partly because I could almost smell the fug of the eponymous canal barge’s cramped cabins – especially the one occupied by Père Jules, the richly eccentric bosun played by Simon – that I found the film hard to sit through. It’s a mark of how strongly I felt that I didn’t even enjoy the colony of cats who live on the barge. Although this was partly because I doubt that no-animals-were-hurt-in-the-making-of this-film, the cats also became part of the stinky mise en scène. The shot of them arranged on and around the barge’s gramophone, which featured in the BFI’s trailer for L’Atalante, was by far the best feline moment in the whole thing. As well as these prim considerations of cleanliness, I couldn’t stand the supposedly irresistible subversive humour of Père Jules. When he briefly disappears from the scene, he’s replaced by a loveably crazy peddler (Gilles Margaritis), who’s even worse. This camelot does magic tricks and doubles up as a one-man band. He flirts with the heroine Juliette (Dita Parlo) and her new husband, the barge captain Jean (Jean Dasté), gets mad – jusr as he got mad when he found Juliette alone with Père Jules in his hovel. It seems we’re meant to see Jean as a humourless, possessive spoilsport – he needs to be taught a lesson, and is when Juliette leaves him – which is probably why I sympathised with him. It’s exasperating when you feel remote from the spirit of a film but trapped in it. Elements like Maurice Jaubert’s evidently fit-for-purpose score made matters worse.
L’Atalante regularly does well in Sight and Sound’s decennial poll and the BFI blurb for this newly- restored version quotes the recently deceased Gilbert Adair, who thought it arguably the greatest film ever made. (Even before I saw it, I couldn’t help thinking about Nick James’s S&S obituary of Adair, which mentioned his pride in never having seen the Godfather films.) It’s the only full-length feature Jean Vigo made: he died, aged twenty-nine, just a few weeks after the first screening of L’Atalante. The three main actors are remarkable in their very different ways. All in all, it isn’t easy to walk out of something as revered as this and I’m glad I stayed the course (around an hour and a half) – although part of what kept me going was the anticipation of reading someone else’s enthusiasm for the picture once it was over. (The BFI programme note by David Baldwin didn’t disappoint in this respect.) The film has a fine opening – the wedding of Juliette and Jean and their progress from the church, away from their guests and towards the barge. The doubts set in for me as soon as Père Jules and the cabin boy (Louis Lefebvre) get into the comedy of losing in the canal the bouquet they were going to present to the bride and constructing a makeshift replacement out of weeds to hand. In the closing stages, when the humour starts to recede, I began to like L’Atalante much more, including the famous sequence in which the bereft Jean has jumped overboard and has a vision of the figure of Juliette appear before him as he moves underwater; and an even better one, which cross-cuts between the lovers, each alone in bed and longing for the other. My liking for the character of the husband was confirmed by his reaction to the cabin boy’s news that Père Jules will find Juliette and bring her back to the barge: Jean is the cleanest-looking man in the film anyway but he decides to have a good wash in preparation for his wife’s return.
26 January 2012
