L'Atalante
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Jean Vigo was a genius of cinema, and LAtalante is his masterpiece. The story is fairy-tale simple, yet told with implications that are absolutely modern...a romance set against the iron and smoke of an industrial corridor, on the banks of a canal.... Jean, the newly married barge captain, takes his bride Juliette aboard LAtalante to join the rest of the crew.... At first, the voyage is as happy as can be...[but] as the barge approaches Paris, Juliette begins to be bored, and (Richard von Busack) With this simplest of story lines, Jean Vigo, working weakened and dying of tuberculosis, fashioned one of the most romantic, poetic, yet down-to-earth films of all time. Revered by filmmakers such as Truffaut (it was LAtalante that inspired him to make films), Bertolucci, Godard, Jarmusch, and Gondry, it has been hailed variously as one of cinemas finest achievements, one of the supreme masterpieces of French cinema...wondrous to behold, utterly indescribable...not so much a film as an entire artistic vision. As fresh today as when it premiered in 1934, LAtalante is a film to see and see again; a film to cherish forever. Charlie Cockey