"Jean Vigo's L'Atalante, his poetic and surreal 1934 romance about a young couple living on a canal barge, is one of the most beautiful, sensual films of all time. Dita Parlo and Jean Daste play the newlyweds getting awkwardly accustomed to married life in close quarters, and their love story shapes the film. But it's their bargemate, the uncouth Pere Jules, played by Michel Simon, who steals the show:"
"The Swiss actor Michel Simon was one of the most distinctive presences in 20th-century French cinema: a soft-faced, gravelly voiced clown capable of tremendous pathos, and true chaos. Charlie Chaplin called him the greatest actor in the world. He worked with the best European directors on some timeless films. As well as acting for Vigo, he played the timid man transformed by his affair with a sex worker in La Chienne (1931) and the incorrigible tramp in Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) for Jean Renoir."
"When Michel Simon plays a part, said Truffaut, we penetrate the core of the human heart. He spent five decades working in the cinema, starting out in the silents, and received his highest accolade, the Berlinale's Best Actor award in 1967, for his role as an antisemitic peasant befriending a young Jewish boy during the war in The Two of Us (Claude Berri)."
Jean Vigo's L'Atalante is a poetic, surreal 1934 romance about a newlywed couple living on a canal barge, with Dita Parlo and Jean Daste portraying awkwardly adjusting spouses. Michel Simon's Pere Jules, a tattooed, well-travelled sailor guarding a cabinet of risqué and macabre curiosities and surrounded by unruly cats, dominates the film with chaotic charisma. Simon brought a soft-faced, gravelly-voiced clown sensibility that could shift to profound pathos. He collaborated with major European directors including Renoir, Dreyer, René Clair and Marcel Carné across five decades. He won the Berlinale Best Actor award in 1967 for Claude Berri's The Two of Us.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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