Not only the director's biography nor even the fortune of this movie make of it one of the most relevant masterpiece of all time. You can find in it the art of the cinema: the minimalism in scenes, in the subject, in characters allows a deep insight in each situation, you can feel its poetry, just like a tale. Although you can find a great care for details, and especially some techniques like underwater shots look pioneering, the movie flows like the Atalante on the river and never looks obsolete or pedantic. That's why you can see it a hundred times, and you'll never find it boring. In the same way the subject is the simplest you can think about: the honeymoon of a young couple. Is that all? No, it is more than this: Vigo tell us what love is. A pretty hard task, don't you think? Just a poet could accomplish it, with no words, but with the essentiality of a story teller. And what about the actors? Three names, Simon, Parlo and Daste, work as mirrors representing, like greek deities, three aspects of our nature. Nothing more than simple things, but filtered by the sensibility of an artist, put together with the ability of a technician, are the backstage for the trascendence of their actions. This is cinema: the seventh art.
Review of L'Atalante
