Flashback/Opinion

'Celine and Julie Go Boating' (1974)

Celine and Julie Go Boating movie poster
Celine and Julie Go Boating movie poster

A strangely beguiling mystery of a journey, Jacques Rivette's surrealist "Celine and Julie Go Boating" floats on the placid lake surface between quasi-reality and nutty fantasia. Julie (Dominique Labourier), a librarian with a love of the magicks, sees freewheeling Celine (Juliet Berto), a magician, in a park, and begins to follow her through the streets, avenues and inclines of Paris. Eventually forming a peculiar sort of friendship (they each impersonate the other in what would have been key moments in their lives), with Celine moving in with her, the two women then embark upon a byzantine murder mystery taking place at an old, abandoned mansion in the city.

Separately, they experience the narrative of this ghost story setup, as a gloomy, widowed man (Barbet Schroeder), living with his sister-in-law (Bulle Ogier), a look-a-like of his dead wife, and a mysterious other woman (Marie-France Pisier), watch over his young daughter (Nathalie Asnar), along with her governess (switching between the two friends as they watch this unfold).

Running like a somber play each day, Celine and Julie recall the events they witnessed by eating the "sweet" left in their mouths upon their expulsion from the house.

Rivette is working with a wild palette, to be sure, but eventually enough threads start to hang until you can at least make out the sense of fabric. A clear influence, one would imagine, on David Lynch for "Mulholland Drive," sharing a kind of surrealist DNA. Reportedly, Rivette worked intensely with his actors in collaborating on the script, a loose, tangent-leaning blueprint that allows the scenes enough form without feeling overly guided. There's a kitchen-sink feel to the proceedings that suggests the writers found a vehicle able to carry a great deal of narrative weight, if not sewing it up neatly, such that small details -- Julie's black fish, Celine's self-aware mangling of certain words, the number of cats that appear in the background of many scenes -- somehow add up together in a kind of melange of ideas and flavors. Approach with an open mind, but do come in.

Extras: The most intriguing is an extended, two-part documentary about Rivette by Claire Denis, but there are also plenty of other goodies, including archive interviews with Rivette, and stars Labourier, Ogier and Berto, along with an audio commentary by the critic Adrian Martin.

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