As newlyweds Juliette tells her husband Jean (actor Jean Dasté) she saw his face in the water before he ever met her. As the story unfolds and Juliette is lost in the city of Paris, Jean out of desperation dives into the river with the hope of seeing her again.
Throughout the decades L' Atalante has grown in stature and now many critics and audiences claim L'Atalante to be one of the greatest films in the world and it is a film that is usually compared along the likes of Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Orson Welles Citizen Kane, Vittoria De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. L'Atalante is a film that contains the whole world, and involves such universal themes as work and play, love and jealousy, dreams and adventure, and heartbreak and reconciliation.