![]() ![]() We’ve all experienced this particularly nagging sting: sitting down for a meal with your immortal beloved, fresh off a spat that grows to outsized proportion between the appetizer and main course. Until, that is, a dark knight appears, throwing the idiosyncratic harmony of their floating household into a tempest. Hanging laundry on the upper deck, she forgoes her girlish peasant dresses for boyish trousers she brings a welcome “feminine touch” to the otherwise masculine maritime realm, darning Jean’s socks and knitting his sweaters-in short, absorbing the “care work” that prepares young wives for inevitable motherhood. Still, she finds a way to cultivate domestic normalcy aboard the good ship L’Atalante. The bloom is barely off the rose when our heroine is thrown headlong into the newfound life of a ship-bound helpmate, sharing her beloved with Michel Simon’s salty seaman “Père Jules” and a colt-ish, unnamed adolescent “Cabin Boy.” Privacy is fleeting, if not altogether nonexistent Jean and Juliette’s hinted-at coitus interruptus is played for ironic laughter. Perhaps Juliette reminds them of their own vows-and the anxiety of impending consummation.Ĭherish the moment, Juliette! Today, you are a virgin bride, but tomorrow you’ll just be another man’s wife. “Poor girl, she has never left the village,” remarks an old woman, observing their procession from the church. The Freudian implication of a ship seeking port is no accident: there is nothing unconscious about chemistry between Juliette and Jean. One can imagine their hurried engagement: she was taken in by this adventurous sailor, he was captivated by her unsullied naïveté. Villagers are right to be wary of “Jean,” her strapping groom, a barge captain who makes his living piloting a lengthy vessel through a snaking network of rivers and canals. ![]() That aforementioned excitement, the product of so many “yearning verses,” leads her across the threshold of purity into a wild new frontier. Juliette, a simple country girl, weds her beloved in implied haste-although not for the reasons you’d expect. Vigo wastes no time with a customary meet-cute: instead, we’re treated to courtside seats at the provincial marriage of a young, infatuated couple. ![]() I’ve now learned to separate the wheat from the chaff, to wrest the genuine article from blatant animal lust or casual “friendliness.” It’s a crucial lesson, best learned the hard way and, in hindsight, no film prepared me for this realization quite like L’Atalante. It took a novel’s worth of unread texts, unacknowledged declarations, and unrequited adoration to understand that no good can come from a love affair born of trickery, misdirection, and legerdemain. I wasn’t uninterested in romance, and my heart was elsewhere: I prioritized absorbing Vigo’s talents through osmosis over pining for some teenager with a patchy beard. Despite a year and change of weekly L’Atalante home viewings, this tale of courtly love always took a backseat. L’Atalante most likely landed on my radar by way of a dollar-bin DVD-plucked by my roving eye like its heroine, Juliette, from the hinterlands of a video store or record shop. For young people, the early death of a great artist holds a particular sway. The tragedy of his too-short career adds a melancholy tint to his elegiac style, elevating what could have been a familiar love story into something wildly radical. His third film-after À propos de Nice and Zero de conduite -and sole feature was completed after his untimely death from tuberculosis. The newfound excitement and precariousness at the heart of every newly minted union is poetically and economically depicted in Jean Vigo’s 1934 L’Atalante. Where the function of a status marriage was nakedly clear-an heir and a spare-the romantic union remains still uncharted territory. To freely choose one’s lifelong partner is a recent freedom, a liberty that brings with it a new kind of propriety. The concept of “companionate marriage” is still novel. If you’re lucky, the brief and blissful prologue of a “honeymoon phase” goes on forever, but even that inevitable dimming retains the sustenance of persistent affection. Glances sly and adoring, flickering candlelight and strewn petals, the promise of undying happiness that only true love can provide: such are the fantasies of every young romantic, the rich loam from which a thousand lines of yearning paeans might bloom. “There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.” -Charles Dickens, David Copperfield ![]()
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