Director: Jacques Rivette
Writers: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Jacques Rivette, Eduardo de Gregorio, Henry James
Photography: Jacques Renard
Music: Jean-Marie Senia
Editor: Nicole Lubtchansky
Cast: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder
Given the surreal rambles of Celine and Julie Go Boating, along with a release date not far past the 1960s, you have to wonder if psychedelic or something like it was the intention here. There are references here to Lewis Carroll and Alice’s adventures with big rabbits and clocks and such. Hard candies falling in the laps of Celine and Julie in dream-like situations (falling literally into their mouths) and provoking visions bears some suggestion of LSD, whose doses at one time were famous for coming on sugar cubes. Today’s viewers may be more likely to think of cannabis edibles, which were largely unheard of in 1974 as far as I know. That works too. I haven’t seen much by director and cowriter Jacques Rivette, but he seems to have some penchant for going long. La Belle Noiseuse (1991) is four hours, a pair of Joan of Arc pictures from 1994 run nearly five hours together, and of course the 1971 Out 1 famously goes nearly 13 hours.
Not until the very end of Celine and Julie is any kind of literal boating seen. The boating in the title is more like the boating found in the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows”: “Turn off your mind relax and float down-stream / It is not dying.” There is a recurring title card in Celine and Julie that in a way tells the story of the whole movie: “But the next morning...” Black screens of a few seconds are used as transitions, sometimes the usual matter of “later that day,” but sometimes mere seconds or less, suggesting powerful epiphanies of some kind to the brain. From over here it looks like a pretty good time, as Celine (Juliet Berto) and Julie (Dominique Labourier) bop about on somewhat mystifying adventures in an alternate reality—looks like they’re having a great time. But merely watching it is not the same thing.
Cast: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder
Given the surreal rambles of Celine and Julie Go Boating, along with a release date not far past the 1960s, you have to wonder if psychedelic or something like it was the intention here. There are references here to Lewis Carroll and Alice’s adventures with big rabbits and clocks and such. Hard candies falling in the laps of Celine and Julie in dream-like situations (falling literally into their mouths) and provoking visions bears some suggestion of LSD, whose doses at one time were famous for coming on sugar cubes. Today’s viewers may be more likely to think of cannabis edibles, which were largely unheard of in 1974 as far as I know. That works too. I haven’t seen much by director and cowriter Jacques Rivette, but he seems to have some penchant for going long. La Belle Noiseuse (1991) is four hours, a pair of Joan of Arc pictures from 1994 run nearly five hours together, and of course the 1971 Out 1 famously goes nearly 13 hours.
Not until the very end of Celine and Julie is any kind of literal boating seen. The boating in the title is more like the boating found in the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows”: “Turn off your mind relax and float down-stream / It is not dying.” There is a recurring title card in Celine and Julie that in a way tells the story of the whole movie: “But the next morning...” Black screens of a few seconds are used as transitions, sometimes the usual matter of “later that day,” but sometimes mere seconds or less, suggesting powerful epiphanies of some kind to the brain. From over here it looks like a pretty good time, as Celine (Juliet Berto) and Julie (Dominique Labourier) bop about on somewhat mystifying adventures in an alternate reality—looks like they’re having a great time. But merely watching it is not the same thing.
I’ve always been daunted by the three-hours-plus length of Celine and Julie. A blog review I read circa 2010 compared it to David Lynch, who by then was firmly ensconced in a permanent state of amber genius and a comparison often reached for. In 2010, Celine and Julie was very difficult to see and the reviewer might have been a little smug about having seen it at all. In other words, take as a bid for cult status. Netflix DVD did not carry it and VHS versions commanded prices starting over $100. I burned with curiosity. It’s now a staple on the Criterion Channel—or did I see it first, finally, on Filmstruck? At any rate it seemed long and aimless and not very effective at surrealism, with zero attempt at special effects of any kind. It’s an aesthetic I can respect, but I didn’t see any David Lynch in Celine and Julie and it left me meh.
But it’s sitting pretty square in the top 200 of the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT), which meant sooner or later this day would arrive and I would be looking at it again. This Halliwell’s assessment strikes me as basically right: “Not an unpleasant experience but sometimes a tiresome one.” Yes, precisely. The picture is critically dependent on the improvisations of its principals, Berto and Labourier, who are playful and charming in certain Parisian ways. But they seem to have little more sense of who they are as characters in the movie than the movie and all those other writers credited do either. Including poor old Henry James who never did anything to them.
The concept seems to be, in short, whoa ho ho it’s magic, which Celine and Julie are both into, though perhaps more of the stage performer illusionist kind. But tarot cards and such appear regularly too. Celine and Julie are somehow transported to and mere witnesses of a melodramatic situation in an alternate reality: a troubled marriage, lavender cake makeup on the wife, an ailing daughter of 8 or 9, a sexy stern nurse (oddly uncredited), and their various absurdly dramatic domestic conflicts. When the story in that reality leads to the death of the girl, Celine and Julie are determined to enter it and change the outcome. Apparently time is of little concern, as it appears the drama can be entered at any point timewise.
One effect I found interesting was thus a lot of repetitions and redundancies of scenes and dialogue, seen from variously subtle other vantage points and kind of harmonizing or rhyming, with a lingering but persistent feeling of déjà vu. But there’s also way too much for me that is at the level of “let’s pretend” with Celine and Julie, particularly in the last hour when they are seen sucking on their hard candies and watching the results as if they were looking at them on a big flat-screen TV in-home theater. Because the story in the alternate reality was largely trite, as intended, it had the perhaps unintentional effect of making Celine and Julie Go Boating at large feel trite. This could also be symptomatic of my general indifference to Lewis Carroll.
Is Celine and Julie Go Baoting worth seeing? Sure, I suppose, especially if you are into French cinema from the 1960s on. It’s experimental. It’s kind of wild and kooky and high pop. The principals are charming and so is the supporting cast. It ends on an arresting image when Celine and Julie actually do go boating, for real, finally. It has lots of nice shots. I would say it wears well but that’s just it. It might have been better at more conventional length, and I can think of lots of ways just off the top of my head to shorten it up.
But it’s sitting pretty square in the top 200 of the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT), which meant sooner or later this day would arrive and I would be looking at it again. This Halliwell’s assessment strikes me as basically right: “Not an unpleasant experience but sometimes a tiresome one.” Yes, precisely. The picture is critically dependent on the improvisations of its principals, Berto and Labourier, who are playful and charming in certain Parisian ways. But they seem to have little more sense of who they are as characters in the movie than the movie and all those other writers credited do either. Including poor old Henry James who never did anything to them.
The concept seems to be, in short, whoa ho ho it’s magic, which Celine and Julie are both into, though perhaps more of the stage performer illusionist kind. But tarot cards and such appear regularly too. Celine and Julie are somehow transported to and mere witnesses of a melodramatic situation in an alternate reality: a troubled marriage, lavender cake makeup on the wife, an ailing daughter of 8 or 9, a sexy stern nurse (oddly uncredited), and their various absurdly dramatic domestic conflicts. When the story in that reality leads to the death of the girl, Celine and Julie are determined to enter it and change the outcome. Apparently time is of little concern, as it appears the drama can be entered at any point timewise.
One effect I found interesting was thus a lot of repetitions and redundancies of scenes and dialogue, seen from variously subtle other vantage points and kind of harmonizing or rhyming, with a lingering but persistent feeling of déjà vu. But there’s also way too much for me that is at the level of “let’s pretend” with Celine and Julie, particularly in the last hour when they are seen sucking on their hard candies and watching the results as if they were looking at them on a big flat-screen TV in-home theater. Because the story in the alternate reality was largely trite, as intended, it had the perhaps unintentional effect of making Celine and Julie Go Boating at large feel trite. This could also be symptomatic of my general indifference to Lewis Carroll.
Is Celine and Julie Go Baoting worth seeing? Sure, I suppose, especially if you are into French cinema from the 1960s on. It’s experimental. It’s kind of wild and kooky and high pop. The principals are charming and so is the supporting cast. It ends on an arresting image when Celine and Julie actually do go boating, for real, finally. It has lots of nice shots. I would say it wears well but that’s just it. It might have been better at more conventional length, and I can think of lots of ways just off the top of my head to shorten it up.
In 1974, we called them "brownies" because that's the only common edibles :-). Not a big fan of this movie, but it did result in the perhaps apocryphal story where Pauline Kael is said to have stood up halfway through the movie, grabbed her coat and hat, announced to the audience "I'm going to the movies!", and walked out.
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