L’Atalante is a movie of an unfocused and diffuse eroticism. The sexual energy officially arises from newlyweds Dita Parlo and Jean Dasté, but is in no way contained by them. The lust we breathe in every frame of L’Atalante is not entirely about feelings between people, and perhaps only partially, dimly about that; when trying to summon the experience of Jean Vigo’s only feature, a complete account must locate and acknowledge a similar feeling between people and animals, people and things, things and things. The ‘between’ might even be more important than the subjects it joins; this is a movie about air, both the heavy mist that greets the bargemates as night stumbles into morning and, more fancifully, the shared space that these creatures inhabit, that is created out of their union. In one of the most celebrated sequences, this is literally true: Parlo and Dasté simultaneously will into existence an imaginary, common plane when sleeping in separate beds miles apart. As they fondle themselves singly, aloneness falls away at the feet of an unnamed kingdom.
Where are we in L’Atalante? Shot on location and in studio, the footage from each is seamlessly blended together in a movie where the seams are otherwise ever present. (Even on repeat viewing, no cut ever falls quite where we anticipate—the camera veers off somewhere when expected grammar dictates a cut and the rhythm is eternally, infernally loopy.) It’s a movie that proceeds from a dream of a romantic, impossibly sophisticated Paris and rudely reminds us of pickpockets, hunger, cold, and confusion in the selfsame city—and yet the deprivations of the latter in no way impugn, or even interrupt, the validity of the former. It’s a movie that respects the fantasies of young hicks for whom the enticements of a garbled radio signal are genuine refinements. It takes great pleasure in realizing that sphere. And yet the bowels of the eponymous ship are unquestionably denser than the world outside, littered with objects that grow more mysterious as they’re explained. It’s the inverse of Noah’s Ark—Michel Simon has been charged with preserving the rude treasures of civilization while the species itself is left to drown. His collection is also, what with its alternative and artifactual sense of history, a clear ancestor of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. (The profusion of cats also suggests a parallel to Julian’s old screening room and I suspect those with little tolerance for kittens tumbling out of every crevice and corner will have even less patience for L’Atalante.)
