The husband is content with the daily routines of barge life, but the wife begins to crave more excitement. At first the lovers' passion for each other is enough to sustain her through long days on the barge. Then she amuses herself with the eccentricities of an elderly crew member who has a woman in every port and a disturbing obsession with cats. Eventually she is lured ashore when the barge docks in Paris.
She falls for and then quickly grows tired of the Depression-era city's gluttony, lust and danger, and is filled with longing for her husband. The woman searches for the barge in vain, but the old eccentric eventually finds her and the couple are lustily reunited.
It's a simple plot that does not do justice to the movie's greatest achievement: the interplay of strong acting, complex characterisation and an overarching brooding atmosphere that conveys the myriad emotions that engulf most new relationships - from joy and ecstasy to resignation and compromise. The cinematography is intense, dreamlike, yet unsentimental.
It is a shame the film stock the Ritzy used jumped around so much it gave me motion sickness, and that the cinema had to slice off the top of the film to make the subtitles fit at the bottom. Oh well. Apparently the character Madonna portrayed in her book Sex and video for Erotica was inspired by Dita Parlo - the main actress in this film.
Other links today:
+ A funny thing happened on the way to the lynching (1924 photo). Surreal.
+ NPR special on the history of hostilities between the Middle East and the West, 1098-2004. Fascinating.
+ Fear itself: Learning to live in the age of terrorism. One man's terror roadtrip through Madrid, NYC, Jerusalem and on British Airways. Disturbing.
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