Jean Vigo
L'Atalante

L'Atalante is a cargo barge that sails back and forth through the canals of 1930s France.

Jean is the captain of the boat, a simple, passionate, and instinctive man. Papa Jules is his lieutenant, an elderly and experienced sailor, marked by a miserable life that has slapped him, yet he's learned to laugh in its face by playing behind its back. The cabin boy is a young boy heedless of life's events, a willing teenager full of hopes and illusions.

The film begins with the marriage between Jean and the angelic Juliette, a lively and enchanting woman with eyes still virginal to earthly beauties, and the consequent boarding of the four on the boat.

L'Atalante thus becomes a modern ark carrying the major existential states of the human journey towards death: being a man, being a woman, being young, and being old.

But I don't want to mislead or sadden you. Vigo doesn’t intend to speak of the end of everything; the director, who was dying (he passed away from tuberculosis shortly after filming ended at the age of 29), wants to talk about love, love for life and for others. He does it with a force and melancholy that only someone about to leave forever can produce, with soul and heart in hand, camera on shoulder, printing pure poetry onto film.

The two newlyweds thus journey alongside their vessel through all the phases of a perfect amorous travail: initial passion, play, lack of freedom, jealousy, painful separation, and happy reunion.

This all unfolds under the curious and wondrous gaze of a boy and the seemingly distracted and superficial though ever-watchful and understanding eye of Papa Jules, who lightens the path of this peculiar little family by making puppets dance and an accordion vibrate (sweetly to the notes of "Parlami d'amore Mariù"), and who in the end helps love to fulfill its course and triumph.

L'Atalante, however, is not merely a vehicle of good sentiments; it is also a refuge, the lair of a man (Jean) who distrusts and fears the world he lives in, who fights with it and locks all the beauty life has given him below deck, risking its withering.

Vigo creates from his depths a work that transcends the very concept of film; he could have made a record or painted a picture, and his urgent expressiveness would have reached our hearts just the same.

The visual beauty of the ensuing scenes might indeed make us believe we're at an art exhibition: the puppets, the underwater hallucination, the run on the beach, the characters turning into ghosts in the fog, Jean advancing cheerfully on all fours toward his bride, the reflection in the shop window of an enchanted woman, the lovers' nightly delirium... these are all elements that confer upon this grand work of art an adorable lightness and a crystal-clear simplicity.

L'Atalante is now 80 years old, a lifetime, and today it is much more powerful than it was back then. In the era of showgirls, footballers turned philanthropists, hosts, and businessmen wrapped in tailored suits, of Berlusconi, of buying the most powerful car, of climbing over the biggest swimming pool, this film is an invitation for all of us to rediscover the true pleasures of life, the true meaning of existence. From a cat giving birth on a matrimonial bed to an old man and a child rejoicing after bringing a gramophone back to life, a piece of advice not to watch the world pass by but to become part of it with our load of loves and illusions.

Dear Jean, wait for me where you are now. I will live my life as intensely as possible so I can tell you about it, sitting next to you on a passing cloud.

Parlami d' amore Mariuuuù........tutta la mia vita sei tuuuu........