Film

Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)

Director: Jacques Rivette

Movie review

From Time Out New York

Film critics love to make bold, belligerent proclamations, like Godard’s contention that cinema is Nicholas Ray, or J. Hoberman’s statement that those who don’t “get” Pickpocket don’t understand movies whatsoever. Allow me to humbly submit my own outrageous praise: There’s cinema, and then there’s Céline and Julie Go Boating. Jacques Rivette’s free-form dissertation on the interzone between performance and spectatorship is the ideal filmgoing experience, even as the “story” transcends all long-standing rules of narrative engagement. It’s the Ulysses of moving pictures: You can feel Rivette exploring the art form’s modes of expression and then erasing their borders, one by one.

Julie (Labourier) is a librarian. Céline (Berto) is an amateur magician. They meet by chance, chase each other around Paris and hang out in Julie’s funky boho flat; in these early scenes, Rivette gives his skillful comedians the chance to simply luxuriate in the film’s lazy-Sunday vibe. Then Julie visits a house where she once worked; hours later, she stumbles out of the residence, dazed and confused. The occupants are “stuck” in a perpetual loop that ends, inevitably, in murder. It also appears that Céline and Julie have been destined to enter this cuckoo-clock melodrama.

What follows can be described as both a prescient peek at gaming culture and the ultimate breakdown of passive viewership, complete with roller-skating Irma Veps, a three-way danse macabre among Bulle Ogier, Barbet Schroeder and Marie-France Pisier, and (spoiler alert) boating. Rivette lays out a smorgasbord of food for thought about how we consume a culture built on storytelling, specifically those flickering images on a wall, but the film’s playfulness and intellectual agenda exist in perfect, perpetual harmony. Whether you’ve traveled the movie’s Möbius-strip structure countless times before or are unaware of the climax’s cosmic punch line going in, the sense of fun to be found in Céline and Julie’s communal fugue state still remains as potent as ever. Game over. Start again.