Before his untimely death at age 29 from tuberculosis, director Jean Vigo was being heralded as one of the shining lights of French cinema. Unlike his contemporaries (like Jean Cocteau and Luis Buneul), his potential was never full realized, although the four movies in this set give you a pretty good idea of how talented he could be. Of the four, the short silent from 1930, A Propos de Nice, is probably the most enjoyable indication of Vigo’s slightly surreal style. Taris, his 10-minute film with French swimmer Jean Taris, has some visual inventive flair, but not much else. His story of school boy revolution, Zero De Conduite, is amusing, but feels incomplete (it runs just 44 minutes). The feature length film , L’Atalante, the story of a couple honeymooning on a barge going through the canals of France, is, according to the DVD notes “one of cinema’s finest achievements.” It’s a bold statement that the actual film just doesn’t back up.
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