Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

leplatypus I have mixed feelings about this one: the history of its editing is so long, complicated and all the more dramatic that Vigo died just after having finished it. Famous director Truffaut passion for it is contagious. The story is original even today (the way to become a sailor wife on a ship) and some moments are really beautiful and poetic and offers a vision of Paris faraway of cliches of the city of light and closer to Eraserhead world...But i'm french and this is France and i just can't stand this old, rustic country! It's always the same thing: With King Kong, America just showed how past and future could rejoice while in France, this boat tale doesn't exit a dark, gloomy country, with no comfort, peasant traditions, no visions for a bright future! Actor Simon is a very painful character to watch, between Quasimodo and Planet of Apes, no hygiene, drunk, half mad: for me, he is the anchor that drowns the ship!At the end, Vigo could claim some rights to Cameron Titanic because its poster (Atalante) is clearly the inspiration for the cult moment at the bow (Titanic)!

chaos-rampant Forget that this shows up in magazine polls as among the ten or twenty best ever, that might set it up as something it's not and then we should be able to know for ourselves about the things we watch, develop an eye that effortlessly knows each thing in itself.Concessions about what it's not, I didn't know all this myself, so let me quote some trivia. It was made in less than ideal conditions, by a filmmaker whose health had taken a turn for the worse (the tuberculosis that would claim him soon after), money run out at some point and they had to improvise stretches. The finishing shots were picked up without Vigo and it was probably edited without him. Much like studio abuse heaped on Welles, it opened in truncated form, with another title tacked on by producers, got a lukewarm response and wasn't going to be rediscovered until much later. The restored version comes to us from as late as the 90s; it's moot to say how authorial it is.And then to say that, far from an ideal project for Vigo, something he conceived from the start, it was a script about romance on a barge that came his way after producers had balked on something else he wanted to make, political. I have Vigo in my mind as someone who was fervent, eager to shuffle things and challenge norms, but alas, he would be gone within a year. Had he really been allowed to flourish and we had the luxury of a dozen films to evaluate, we might be looking back at this as something else.We still have all that he captured on his last turn, the lovely journey, and even better so far as knowing him, the vision. The journey has something immensely affirming about it, in how a girl from a small village agrees to marriage with the young captain of a small barge, refusing to settle for the ordinary life; she simply leaps into the boat with one clean swoop and leaves for a journey of horizons. And this is Vigo's own commitment. He enters a story that is not his and sails on a journey of horizons. This is all mirrored in the girl who is so eager to simply take everything in, eager to brush up against everything, fascinated, keen to know. She's a joy to watch.The whole film unfolds as something from her own soul, which is Vigo's. Characters brush up against each other in close quarters. Rooms are always overflowing with stuff, everything feels heaped together. There's a roughneck sailor onboard who has been all over the world, embodying all of Vigo's eagerness to share, now stories about Shanghai, then dance and play the accordion.Zero de Conduite opened with two kids sharing toys with each other on a train, trying to impress and amuse each other. This is about youths sharing themselves with each other on a boat that sails through drab France, trying to find out. There's a lot of hugging and fondling between them with a sense of complete delight at the touch.And this is how Vigo creates. Instead of "scenes" with beginning and end that advance a plot, tentative exploration, our eye rummaging through stuff. It feels like early Cassavetes. He's trying to find out what comes out from hiding.Heartbreak eventually. The boy has grown increasingly controlling, dismayed at her free spiritedness. She wants to see Paris, he won't let her. Watch it to the end, it's lovely. He has dived in the river, looking to see her. She has been wandering alone around Paris. A marvelous scene intercuts between the two alone in separate beds, yearning towards the camera like out of New Wave. So she listens to music that summons up the old storytelling sailor who takes her back to him. God knows what we were deprived of, in my mind even greater works. But I can see why Tarkovsky loved this.

kurosawakira Vigo's last film that quite literally killed him. One of the finest films I've seen, one that mystifies, evades, invites to be seen again and again. Having these kinds of films around gratifies simply since they're so few and far between.For some reason this pairs up well with "In the Mood for Love" (Fa yeung nin wa, 2000) by Wong Kar-Wai: both are masterful depictions of space and fluid camera, love that is and love that isn't, yearning that is and is not realized. Vigo's ability for ellipsis and the implied is uncanny. He leaves us a lingering suspicion and our ever-changing memory.Parlo is perfect in the kind of sweetness and desirability that makes the camera fall in love with her. In terms of craft, Simon's Jules is the most astonishing character in Vigo: wildly playful, Falstaffian, rugged and rough on the outside but still basically the only one in the film whom we may call sagacious. He's the architect in the film, ultimately, something the tormented Jean cannot be: he makes things happen. Incidentally, he's the one who fixes things: the gramophone, the marriage of Jean and Juliette, the fate of the barge at the office, and yet he still remains in the background. It's the mélange of Simon's flamboyance and Vigo's remarkable introspection and empathy that make Jules the enigma that he ultimately is.The Criterion Collection has released this on Blu-ray in "The Complete Films of Jean Vigo". It's among the most pivotal cultural acts of the digital era.

Atreyu_II There are three main reasons that made me watch this: because it's old, foreign (french, in this case) and because I love ships.Honestly I thought I'd like this movie much better. It just couldn't captivate me. I think that this movie's reputation as one of the all-time greats doesn't justify. Its plot is simple but not especially involving, or maybe it just wasn't properly worked. Basically it's all about a married couple on their honeymoon (or is it bittermoon?) in a boat trip (a boat used to have only men aboard) and very little happens - that is, other than constant conflicts aboard. The majority of characters are not likable, except the cats and the young woman.I didn't like it very much, but François Truffaut did, as did other filmmakers of the French New Wave. They probably took a lesson or two from this to create their own films.A shame that director Jean Vigo died so young (he was 29). Had he lived a longer life and maybe he could have become a big name in the french cinema.