Vigo's L'Atlante

I watched L'Atlante at the Anthology Film Archives on Sunday night. Hailed for its poetic realist style, the film struck me as more charming than realist. This is probably due to my distance, both temporal and spatial, from its depiction of a provincial wedding and a honeymoon voyage in a barge. In the film, new wife, Julette, tells her husband, Jean, that, before they have met, she has already seen him in the water of a bucket in which she has plunged her head. If only water has such oracular power! Or the unconscious, which water may symbolize, tells us such certain truths. Still, the idea is charming.

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