A honeymoon couple, a barge captain and a peasant girl, are split apart by their contrary hankerings — his for the timeless romance of the river, hers for the modern romance of the city. This, a more conventionally structured work than Zero for Conduct, is Jean Vigo's second and last feature, completed just before the end of his short and sickly life at age twenty-nine. His free mixture of realistic observation and poetic imagination, and his inventive, intimate, improvisatory use of natural locales, mark him as one of the guiding lights of the French New Wave, twenty-five years later. Michel Simon's blooming performance as the scrofulous first mate can be suffocating sometimes; but the tour of his cabin, cluttered with the mementos accumulated over a lifetime by a crazy old salt, is a stand-out scene. Dita Parlo, Jean Dasté. (1934) — Duncan Shepherd
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