Jean Vigo's only full-length feature is a poetic masterpiece on the theme of passionate love, employing the fantastic set pieces and bizarre juxtapositions that were so dear to the director. In telling of a young barge captain and his peasant bride in their first days together on his barge, and of their separation when she sneaks off to Paris, L'Atalante surprises realism with surrealism, much as Jean is surprised by his wife's desire. Shot against a backdrop of the Parisian canals-with which, Vigo wrote, “we were intoxicated”-the film anticipates the methods of neorealism by almost fifteen years, particularly in the acting: “To reveal,” as Vigo said, “the hidden reason from a gesture, to extract from an ordinary person his interior beauty-or a caricature of him.” Michel Simon as the grisly, tattooed Père Jules, and Dita Parlo as the bride Juliette, are unforgettable.