Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

In “L’atalante,” a young girl from the French provinces, named Juliette, marries a barge operator. His occupation seems a promise of escape, and she dreams of traveling the world with him. But marriage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: Barge life is by nature unexciting; the couple quarrel constantly. The vessel has one other occupant: Père Jules. A wily old stumblebum who lives below deck and looks something like a barnacled orangutang, Jules is intended as a counterpoint to the prosaic newlyweds. And the scene in which Juliette pays him a visit has overtones of the fantastic. His room is a king-sized curio cabinet, one festooned with wonders culled from the far corners of the world. It’s all so external to Juliette’s frame of reference. Tentatively, eyes peeled wide, she pokes around the space as a virgin does a sex boutique. On some level Jules, with his mangy hair and naked-lady tattoos, represents maleness in all its weird and stinky glory — he’s the manifestation of everything the girl fears (and perhaps hopes) is lurking behind the bland face of her husband. A bit later Juliette ditches her hubby and runs off to Paris. But things work out in the end.

Related

• “L’atalante,” which is one of the foundational movies of the French cinema, can be streamed via Hulu.
• Director Jean Vigo, the son of an anarchist and something of a radical himself, made three feature films, all of them unforgettable. Criterion has released a nice DVD set containing all of his work.