L'Atalante, 1934

A film that asks - and answers - the question "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the barge now that they've seen Paris?" This is a film about discovery: A young bride finds that life in the big city isn't everything she's hoped it would be; her brooding groom realizes that he's lost the best thing he'll ever have; an eccentric sailor learns that his cat has had kittens in the boss' bunk. Large portions of this film lack dialogue; the movie could probably have been made with title cards instead of sound with very few script changes. Even beyond the laconic script, the silent film montage technique can be seen in the underwater and parallel dream sequences. It is easy to see how this film would have influenced the Nouvelle Vague auteurs: Paris is as forbidding and even as ugly here as in Les 400 Coups or Breathless. There is not a lot of character development here, and what there is comes from the actors. Michel Simon is excellent as the crusty old sailor whose bark is worse than his bite, and Dita Parlo seems very natural as the bride who is 2/3 sweet girl and 1/3 sex kitten. The DVD is good; for a 70-year-old film, it is very crisp.

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