Imagine, if you will, a young man who is totally committed to anarchy, who distrusts and hates authority in all of its forms and guises. He was raised in an attic room full of cats.  When he was twelve, his father, an idealist who had fought unwisely for social justice, died in prison. Our young man is a cynic who knows the desire to control and take advantage of other people throbs darkly in all of us, that the abuse of power is a basic ingredient of human nature, that persons in authority inevitably mistreat those beneath them.

Our young man – let us call him Jean – aspires to make movies that will illuminate the cruelty of authority and celebrate willful disobedience. He has already made a short film about schoolboys rebelling against their teachers. Even though this movie was banned by the Board of Censors for being subversive and promoting an anarchistic spirit, there is one producer who believes in Jean's talent and is willing to take the financial risk of letting him direct a feature-length film.

There are, however, two difficulties. The first difficulty is that the producer has told Jean he must agree to work with a screenplay written by someone else, a screenplay for a formulaic romantic comedy about a village girl who decides to marry the young captain of a stinky river barge and spend her honeymoon with him on the barge (also maybe the rest of her life) while living in close quarters with a screwball two-man crew. What can an anarchist do with that? The second difficulty is that Jean is dying of septicemia.

Jean knows this is his only chance to make a feature-length film. Bitterly, he agrees. The producer will drop the project if Jean deviates too much from the prescribed screenplay, so he follows it from start to finish. He begins the movie as the screenplay tells him to, with a quaint country wedding procession and a charming gift of flowers. He includes all the scenes called for by the screenplay, and in the last shot at the very end of the movie, he shows us the newlyweds lying on the deck of the barge in a tangle of caresses, laughter on their lips, their eyes glowing with the rapture of marital bliss, just as the screenplay says he should do.

But our young director does something else as well. Jean adds to the story a multitude of incidents, embellishments, and details, unexpected revelations of doubt and pain, sudden flare-ups of temper and hurtfulness, flashes of brutality that undermine the Pollyanna sweetness of the plot. Each of these added elements is so exquisitely well crafted that it becomes in and of itself a complete vignette or poem. There is, for example, one camera shot that shows us the bride, still wearing her white wedding dress, walking slowly and pensively by herself along the length of the oily deck as night falls. Seen from a distance, she looks like a lonely ghost condemned to drift through the darkness in pale, diaphanous solitude forever. Watching her, you can't help but be engulfed in a profound mood of loss and melancholy. This is pure visual poetry!

The collective force of these added elements is much greater than the insipid story into which Jean has inserted them, and thus he succeeds in transforming the characters, lifting them out of the two-dimensional flatness of their existence in the original screenplay and developing them into deeply layered, complex, conflicted, and unpredictable individuals.

Underneath her apparent delirium of happiness, is the bride so depressed, so full of despair, that she wishes she were dead? Did she marry the groom because she loves him or merely because he offered her a way to escape the prison of the village? And has she escaped the prison of the village, with its narrow morality and vicious gossip, only to find herself in the even more confining prison of a bad marriage on a filthy barge? Does the groom love the bride, or does he just love having someone he can possess and control?  Will he respect her and treat her as an equal, or will he keep a jealous eye trained on her every move, berate her for imagined indiscretions, hit her with his fist and abandon her?  And what about that screwball crew? Is the cabin boy a good-natured dimwit or a cunning sadist? Is the first mate a charming, eccentric, mischievous old salt, always ready to entertain us with a chantey or a concertina tune or a tall tale of the high seas, or is he a subhuman beast capable of rape and murder when he gets drunk enough?

Jean is so ill that he is forced to direct much of the film while lying on a stretcher. When the movie finally opens, Jean has been bedridden for months and is incapable of going to the theater to see it. But he already knows what has been done to his creation. The producer has betrayed Jean by changing the title, changing the music, and re-editing every scene to mute the dark elements – in other words, he has tried to convert it back into a conventional romantic comedy. The movie receives mixed reviews from the critics, but it's a complete bust at the box office, and after three weeks it's pulled out of the theater. Two days later, on October 5, 1934, Jean Vigo dies of lung failure at the age of 29.

That's the story of how L'ATALANTE was created, expurgated, and promptly forgotten. Equally dramatic is the story of how it was rediscovered and restored so that now we can see the film as Jean Vigo intended it to be seen. Here's a brief summary of the key events.  

Over the next fifteen years several different versions of L'ATALANTE popped up, all of them even worse than the producer's version. These debasements sparked the curiosity of critics who saw not only their flaws but also many moments of inspired cinematic genius. Their curiosity remained unsatisfied because no one could find a print of Vigo's original version. (After a while, even the producer's version disappeared.) We all know what happens to unsatisfied curiosity. It either dies out or turns into a wildfire. In this case it turned into a wildfire. By 1949 the Federation Francaise des Cine-Clubs had decided to devote itself to restoring Vigo's lost masterpiece, and various members of this organization spent the next forty-one years trying to do so with only limited success.  One tactic was to try to improve the debased versions by adding to them new footage from the unedited rushes, cuts, and out-takes (nearly thirty hours of film!) that were still available, ironically enough, and which were gladly provided by the Cinematheque Francaise. These attempts at improvement had more of the real Vigo in them, but the patchwork editing made them jerky and confusing, and of course they could never quench that wildfire of curiosity because they were, after all, only guesses. Another tactic was to search for a print of Vigo's original.

Finally, after forty-one years of hard work and failure, one of the researchers hit paydirt in 1990. Deep in the musty sub-basements of the British Film Institute Archives, he found a perfectly preserved never-shown print of Vigo's original cut. Over the next eleven years, this print was fine-tuned with meticulous care by adding bits and pieces from the above-mentioned thirty hours of rushes, cuts, and out-takes, all in accordance with specific statements in Vigo's notes, which tell us how he would have made his movie even darker and more subversive had he not felt compelled to strike a compromise with the producer. Thus it was not until 2001 that aficionados of fine cinema were finally able to see a version of L'ATALANTE that's truly faithful to Vigo's intentions.

Even though the only versions available to them were the crudely edited "improvements" bravely produced by the Federation Francaise des Cine-Clubs during the 1950's, the intelligentsia of the film world had already anointed and canonized Vigo's movie long before the 1990 discovery was made in the British Film Institute Archives. A "Sight and Sound" poll conducted in 1962 put L'ATALANTE near the top of a short list of the best films ever made. According to Vincent Canby, it's a "very great movie."  Francois Truffaut wrote, "When Jean Vigo shot L'ATALANTE . . . he achieved perfection, a masterpiece." Georgia Brown of "The Village Voice" declared that L'ATALANTE "may be the greatest film ever made."

Cynic that I am, I can't help but wonder if all these eminent authorities were a wee bit too infatuated with the legendary history of the film. It's natural to imagine what a mutilated work of art might have been like before it was mutilated, but it's risky to declare it a masterpiece on the basis of what you imagine.

My own opinion is that even the 2001 version of L'ATALANTE is not quite a masterpiece, and certainly not the greatest film ever made. It is a brilliant mess of contradictions made by a genius who had to struggle under conditions that most of us would find intolerable.

The cinematography, music, and editing are excellent. Some of the camera shots have an absolutely stunning impact and can never be forgotten. Nearly every scene crackles with internal tension – the natural result of the insane forced marriage between Vigo's bleak view of human nature and the happy-ending optimism of the story-line he was expected to follow. Best of all is the acting. It's obvious that every member of the cast understood exactly how and why Vigo wanted to subvert the screenplay, and they all do a splendid job of conveying a dark and bewildering emotional ambivalence and behavioral unpredictability. The bride (Juliette) is played by the famous German actress Dita Parlo, and the groom (Jean) by Vigo's friend Jean Daste, a little-known stage actor who had played a part in Vigo's banned short film about rebellious schoolboys (ZERO FOR CONDUCT). The cabin boy is played by Louis Lefebvre, a young man with no previous acting experience who does a fine job in his first role. A vendor who rides around on a bicycle with a huge box of merchandise strapped to his back and flirts with Juliette when the barge stops in Paris is played by a well-known French acrobat, magician, dancer, and stage performer named Gilles Margaritis. In some ways his hyperactive combination of lechery, suaveness, antic mimicry, and thinly disguised pain and anxiety constitutes the most stylish performance in the movie.

But not the best performance. That honor belongs to Michel Simon, who was already a celebrity in France because of his starring roles in Jean Renoir's LA CHIENNE and BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING. The alchemical power of Simon's interpretation of Father Jules, the battered old sailor now reduced to serving as first mate on a lowly river barge, mesmerized me and left me awestruck. I cannot fully describe the complexity of Simon's characterization, nor is there any way to properly convey the raw vitality of his acting style. He is the only actor I've ever seen who in a single scene was convincingly charming, childlike, lovable, bashful, ingenious, wise, repulsive, menacing, brutish, clumsy, dense, and ageless as a reptile. Vigo fans love the scene in which Simon throws himself down and wrestles with himself on the deck of the barge in order to demonstrate his mastery of the moves used by pro wrestlers. They also love the scene in which he strips to the waist and sticks his cigar in his navel while Juliette stares in fearful fascination at the crudely rendered sailor's tattoos that cover his entire torso. But take any scene you want. All you have to do is focus on Simon's saggy-baggy mug (half mournful hound, half sly old orangutan) and watch it reveal with a thousand and one subtle shifts of expression what Father Jules might be capable of doing.