L’ATALANTE
With Michel Simon, Dita Parlo, Jean Daste, Gilles Margaritis, and Louis Lefevre.
The popular French stage and movie actor Michel Simon, who had already appeared in four Jean Renoir films, was selected to play Pere Jules, and the German film star Dita Parlo, who would subsequently play a lonely war widow in Renoir’s La grande illusion, was cast as Juliette; this package and the script were handed to Vigo, along with a request to include some songs in the film. Vigo–who was delighted with the choice of actors but much less happy with the story–agreed to these terms, requesting only a few minor changes in the script, such as the substitution of a peddler for the young sailor who tempts Juliette, the substitution of several cats for a single dog, and a somewhat more upbeat treatment of the ending.
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Vigo had been plagued all his life with weak lungs–a condition he shared with his wife, Lydou, whom he had met in a sanatorium when he was 23–and had been feverish during much of the shooting of Zero, his temperature ranging from 102 to 104. L’Atalante was shot on a barge from November to February (with periodic trips to the Gaumont studios, where sets were built duplicating some of the barge interiors and representing a working-class dance hall), and Vigo was sick roughly half the time. By the time the principal photography and rough cut (which proceeded simultaneously) were finished, he was too ill to work any further. After an abortive attempt at a holiday in the country he took to his bed, and during the seven remaining months of his life he went out only twice–once to view the work in progress with his editor, and once to see the virtually completed film with Nounez and his associates. (The film’s final aerial shot was filmed later according to Vigo’s instructions, so it’s likely that Vigo himself never saw it.)
What does this genius consist of? It’s easier to define in Zero de conduite, an exhilarating celebration of nonstop rebellion against bourgeois propriety and authority informed by free-flowing poetry and fantasy. But having recently seen that film and L’Atalante back to back, I’ve come to the conclusion that the much more “conventional” and commercial L’Atalante is an even greater work, for reasons that are less immediately obvious.
In another scene, in his cabin–where he introduces her to the exotic trinkets he has collected from all over the world on his sea travels–she comes upon a pair of human hands pickled in a jar. Jules indicates that they belonged to a friend who died three years ago (we see his photo) and that they’re all he has left of him–a piquant line that suggests that the friend may also have been a lover. (Just before this, to demonstrate the sharpness of his stiletto, Jules deliberately cuts his knuckle and then licks the wound–at which point Juliette instinctively licks her lips.) Jean suddenly enters, obviously upset by the intimacy he recognizes between Jules and his wife, and starts complaining about the cabin’s messiness and the smell of the cats; before he starts breaking dishes and a mirror in a rage, he asks Jules to identify a nude black woman in a photograph, and Jules cracks, “That’s me when I was young.”
