Southern Illinois University Carbondale OpenSIUC Articles Department of Cinema and Photography Spring 2011 A Dreary Life on a Barge: From L'Atalante to Young Adam Walter C. Metz Southern Illinois University Carbondale, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cp_articles Recommended Citation Metz, Walter C. "A Dreary Life on a Barge: From L'Atalante to Young Adam." Weber: The Contemporary West 27, No. 2 (Spring 2011): 51-66. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Cinema and Photography at OpenSIUC. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of OpenSIUC. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Walter Metz A Dreary Life on a Barge: From L’Atalante to Young Adam Young Adam: The barge amidst the Scottish landscape PRELUDE While surfing around Netflix looking If there is anything further in spirit from for the name of the film in which Ewan L’Atalante—a romantic fairy tale about McGregor played James Joyce—Nora the enduring power of love—it must be (Pat Murphy, 2000)—I stumbled across Young Adam, a bitter tale of an astonish- Young Adam (David Mackenzie, 2003), ingly amoral drifter who kills one woman a film in which the young Obi-Wan plays and uses all of the others he encounters to a man who gets involved in a romantic quaff his ruthless sexual appetite. And yet, triangle aboard a river barge. Immedi- Mackenzie’s film—repeatedly and perhaps ately, I thought of L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, unavoidably—echoes scenes and situa- 1934), the most famous barge movie of tions from L’Atalante. Is Young Adam a all, and indeed, one of the most emotional deliberate, deconstructive remake of Vigo’s experiences of this filmgoer’s life. After masterpiece, or just a circumstantial watching Young Adam when it arrived engagement with its plot material? in the mail (an analysis of the profound I belabor my discovery of Young connections between the cinematic and Adam because this intertextual configu- postal joys that Netflix provides I will save ration’s hold over me led also to the for some other time), I became confused. literary artifact on which Mackenzie’s FILMFOCUS PRELUDE film is based, a Scottish Beat novel by the novel on which it is based. Taking this Alexander Trocchi. Also entitled Young into account in the way we write about Adam, Trocchi’s novel, first published film adaptations seems a crucial corrective in 1954, has an obscure history that is to, for example, the abundance of Shake- as fascinating as the tragedy of Vigo’s spearean film criticism written by Renais- life cut short by tuberculosis. In fact, sance, and not film, scholars. Vigo directed much of L’Atalante from a This essay, then, proposes to see Mack- stretcher, in a tubercular-induced fever. enzie’s film from the point-of-view of an How does Vigo’s psychic condition while adaptation scholar whose method takes film directing relate to the drugged stupor history just as seriously as literary history. in which Trocchi composed his fiction, In effect, this means that I will analyze the including his masterpiece, Cain’s Book film using an intertextual grid in which (1960), the autobiographical depiction of a the influence of L’Atalante is taken into heroin addict which established his status consideration as much as is Trocchi’s source not only in the Scottish literary canon, novel. As a corollary, this also means that but in the international realm of 20th the Scottish status of both Trocchi’s novel century literature? We are thus left with a and Mackenzie’s film are internationalized triangular intertextual configuration with with a concern for the relationship between profound repercussions for film adaptation the French cultural depiction of gritty life studies. For while Mackenzie’s Young on the barges with its Scottish counter- Adam is a fidelity-based adaptation of part. Interestingly, the literary response Trocchi’s novel, both texts are of interest to Trocchi’s novel, small though it may be, for film studies in their engagement with addresses a similar transnational concern. L’Atalante. In his introduction to the Canongate edition My discovery of Trocchi’s novel points of Trocchi’s novel, John Pringle argues: to a major difference between the kind of “Young Adam, with its self-obsessed, adaptation study that my work offers and probably self-deluded, possibly insane that is engaged by most literary scholars narrator has a literary ancestry stretching interested in film. Typically, people back to Hogg’s Justified Sinner (André trained in literary studies will write about Gide admired Hogg, and Trocchi admired the films that are made out of the impor- Gide, and so the two-way traffic between tant work they study. My approach—to Scottish and French writing continues)” let interesting films lead me back to novels (viii). This line of literary history acti- upon which they happen to be based—not vates interesting questions about French only produces a different form of adapta- cinema of the 1930s. To what extent is tion criticism, but it also more appropri- Vigo’s Surrealism in L’Atalante related to ately matches the ways in which people Gide’s modernism, and how might we see who are not academics watch films and these earlier forms of cultural rebellion as read books. While there are certainly non- influences on the Existentialist and Beat academics who care more about novels post-war culture of France, Scotland, and than films, it is an indisputable fact that the United States? The raising of these the size of the audience for any film—with sorts of questions attests to the power of an the exception, perhaps, of The Bible—is intertextual, interdisciplinary method for orders of magnitude greater than that of studying textual artifacts. 4 3 FROM SCOTLAND TO FRANCE, Where L’Atalante is about romantic AND BACK AGAIN love, downplaying physical intimacy, Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam is L’Atalante, one of the unques- about sex, not believing in the possi- tioned canonical masterpieces of the bility of love. Like L’Atalante, the novel cinema, was directed by Jean Vigo concerns four people squished onto a in 1934. It features a narrative study barge, this one traveling the canals in of the complex relationships among Scotland between Glasgow and Edin- four people on a barge carrying coal burgh. A woman Ella owns a barge, the between Paris and Le Havre. At the Atlantic Eve, which is captained by her beginning of the film, Jean (Jean Dasté), husband, Leslie. Why do both films link the captain of the boat called Atalante, their barges to the Atlantic Ocean? Do marries a small-town girl, Juliette they, like Antoine Doinel at the end of (Dita Parlo), who is hoping for a life Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), more exciting than the one offered by look to that ocean for a cinematic her village. Juliette arrives on the boat relationship with the United States? to find it already occupied by Jules Leslie hires on a first mate, Joe, the (Michel Simon), the captain’s mate, and first-person narrator of the novel. Leslie a cabin boy (Louis Lefebvre). Cheated and Ella have a young son, Jim. As the out of the opportunity to finally see novel opens, Joe discovers a young Young Adam: Joe fishes Cathie’s body out of the river Paris, Juliette decides one day to woman’s body lying in the canal. This venture out on her own. Wounded by woman turns out to be Cathie, Joe’s this betrayal of him, Jean returns to Le former lover. Joe sat passively by while Havre, abandoning Juliette to the city. Cathie drowned, with his unborn baby When Jean almost loses his job due in her womb. When Joe learns that to living life in a stupor without his Leslie is impotent, he begins an affair beloved Juliette, Jules returns Juliette with Ella, right under Leslie’s nose. to Jean, and the film ends happily. When Leslie discovers the affair, he 4 4 WEBER THE CONTEMPORARY WEST FILMFOCUS leaves the boat. Shortly thereafter, Joe floating on the surface of this river. leaves Ella. The novel ends with Cath- Joe (Ewan McGregor) sees the body, ie’s lover, a plumber, being wrongly and tries incompetently to grab it with sentenced to death for her murder. a boat hook. Leslie (Peter Mullan), Joe attends the trial, but as with Cath- Joe’s captain on the barge, laments, ie’s death, does nothing to stop the “Ah, you’re bloody useless, gimme unjust events unfolding before him. that,” as he drags the dead woman’s Most reviewers of the film version body onto the dock. They stare at the of Young Adam begin with the observa- dead woman’s barely clothed body a tion that it is reminiscent of L’Atalante. little bit too long, until Joe suggests, Roger Ebert begins his review, “Two “I suppose we should cover her.” men and a woman on a barge. No Leslie reluctantly agrees. Joe covers one who has seen Jean Vigo’s famous the woman’s body with a burlap sack, film L’Atalante can watch Young Adam gently touching her with his hand. without feeling its resonance.” In her From an intertextual studies reflections on Mackenzie’s film, Liza perspective, the presentation of the Bear comments: “The handsomely woman’s body in the water at the mounted result bears little resemblance beginning of Young Adam firmly to Jean Vigo’s classic, L’Atalante, in establishes this film’s difference from story or sensibility, yet it retains that L’Atalante.