Les Amants de Brasmort is a solemn piece set in the world of canal-barges that offered Pagliero an opportunity of returning to the realism and humanity he had captured in Un homme marche dans la ville. Shot on location at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, outside Paris, and then downstream along the Seine to Rouen, the film offers a documentary view of boatmen and their boats, of loading and unloading cargo and sailing the river. Pagliero is here obsessed with docks, with water and ships and mist. Clearly, too, he is still full of the spirit that made Yves Allégret’s Dédée d’Anvers (1948) and his own Un homme marche dans la ville work so well. As the film opens, we discover the quayside at Conflans, with its cranes rivetted into the ground or set on rails, moving coal into barge-holds. The greys of Roger Hubert’s cinematography won many plaudits for its powerful depiction of a harsh social environment. Later, a series of expressive shots depicts the major port of Rouen: Pagliero sets up a series of dissolves. Their double-exposure prolongs a vision of the forest of masts, the cranes and factory-chimneys and church-spires. His tenderly nostalgic eye pauses before the barge cemetery at Brasmort, near Conflans, where wooden boats rot halfin and half-out of the water as elderly, sad-eyed former bargees tend to their goats and chickens. As in most of his films, Pagliero is driven here by a passionate concern for showing how sexual attraction shatters class conflict. André Bazin saw in this film an echo of Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante.