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L'Atalante

Director: Jean Vigo
Year: 1934
Run-time: 1 hr 29 min
Source: Criterion Channel Streaming

- This is one of those eternally influential films that doesn't resonate with me as much as it does many others, ranking as high as 12th on the latest Sight and Sound poll.  I don't dislike it, it just seems a bit slight to me.  There are some beautiful shots, and the romance is sweet although clearly doomed.

- Along with Marius, it's another reminder that if you were middle-class and wanted to see the world before mid-century, then you needed to become a sailor.  What a hard life that would have been, and the rootlessness really infects this film and its poor heroine.

- The film was heavily erotic for the time - the shots of the man and his wife longing for each other in different beds is pretty genius - the dotted shading is strangely evocative.

- Michel Simon stars as the clown Pere Simon, a slight evolution of his character in Boudo Saved From Drowning (which Renoir built around the person of Simon).  What an icon - there's not really anyone like him in modern cinema, although many actors have aspired to that level of id.
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