Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Côte d'Azur, especially its wealthy inhabitants.
Jean Vigo's debut short is a landmark of the avant-garde documentary tradition. Its cinematography is genuinely exceptional — Vigo and Boris Kaufman (brother of Dziga Vertov) deploy hidden-camera techniques, extreme angles, and rhythmic montage to savage effect, creating images of startling power. Its novelty is equally high: the film essentially invents a mode of poetic-satirical documentary that fuses the city-symphony form with biting class critique, producing something wholly singular. The ending lands its satirical punch effectively. Acting and conventional plot are irrelevant categories here — this is a non-narrative documentary — so both score low by default rather than failure.