L'Atalante

1934 [FRENCH]

Action / Adventure / Comedy / Drama / Romance

13
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 88% · 40 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 88% · 5K ratings
IMDb Rating 7.7/10 10 18521 18.5K

depression marriage surrealism underwater barge marital problem

Plot summary

Newly married couple Juliette and ship captain Jean struggle through marriage as they travel on the L'Atalante along with the captain's first mate and a cabin boy.

Director

Jean Vigo Photo
Jean Vigo

Top cast

Charles Dorat Photo
Charles Dorat as Thief
Michel Simon Photo
Michel Simon as Le père Jules
Gen Paul Photo
Gen Paul as Master of Ceremonies at Wedding
Genya Lozinska Photo
Genya Lozinska as Fortune Teller
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
746.18 MB
924*720
French 2.0
NR
Subtitles fr  
24 fps
1 hr 29 min
Seeds 6
1.47 GB
1376*1072
French 2.0
NR
Subtitles fr  
24 fps
1 hr 29 min
Seeds 18

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by gavin6942 7 / 10

The Studio and the Director

Newly married couple Juliette and a ship captain Jean struggle through marriage as they travel on the L'atalante along with the captain's first mate Le père Jules and a cabin boy."L'Atalante" was mutilated by its distributor. Gaumont cut the film's run time to 65 minutes in an attempt to make it more popular and changed the title to Le chaland qui passe ("The Passing Barge"), the name of a popular song at the time by Lys Gauty, which was also inserted into the film, replacing parts of Jaubert's score. Vigo was too weak to defend the film as his condition grew worse. The film was a commercial failure, which is somewhat startling considering how it is now regarded as one of the all-time greats.This film is what has made Jean Vigo so celebrated. It is his only full-length film, and one of only four films total. And yet he remains a towering figure in France approximately 80 years later.
Reviewed by wandereramor 7 / 10

Come and let me take you on a sea cruise

L'Atalante is one of those films that doesn't really survive it's critical reputation. It's not so much that it's overrated as that its status as a Cinematic Masterpiece by a French Auteur casts a heavy burden on it which the light, airy film can't escape.But enough meta-criticism. Taken on its own, L'Atalante is a charming film about a honeymoon whose light nature and relaxed pace manages to immerse the audience in a realm of simple pleasure. There's little dialogue, and Vigo draws on the attractions of silent film, with a lot of light humour and simple representational images. It's a world you would want to step into, and one that you almost think you can.Alas, things cannot stay so serene forever, and so trouble eventually arrives in our honeymooners' relationship. The plot is believable and well-observed, if not exactly captivating, but I have to say I missed the more leisurely early parts.I can't help but compare L'Atalante with a film with a similar storyline and inverted structure, F. W. Murnau's Sunrise. L'Atalante undeniably comes off worse in the comparison: it simply doesn't achieve the epic grandeur that Sunrise does. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it seems unavoidably like a prototype for a film released in the previous decade, and that makes it hard to live up to the hype. Still, it's a nice experience, and that's more than you can say about most films.
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