Truly Dreadful Film

Absolutely Fantastic

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

One of my favorite films. Laugh out loud funny---and disturbing at the same time. That is a hard combination to pull off. The secret are the two lead actors who play the title roles. They are so funny and so talented and they play off each other so well that if this was a slice of life film where nothing much happens it would still be worth watching. But this is not slice of life. This is a carefully constructed mystery which questions the nature of reality and personality and memory. And it stands the test of time. I first saw it in the mid 1970s. I watched it again last night. It was great both times and every time in between.I am surprised that there are so few reviews for this movie considering the fact that so many directors have copied it. Case in point, Mulholland Drive which has over a 1000 reviews. How can an "homage to" movie get so many more reviews than the source material? Especially when the source material is so good!

This Jacques Rivette's genre-defying opus is an unsung hero upon its release in 1974, but 40 years later when we are all stumped in light of the cornucopia of derivative outputs, this masterpiece attests that it is never too late to burrow into historical archives, advocate some hidden gems and introduce them to the fast food generation, and CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING could overtly widen one's filmic horizon by its unprecedented storytelling and the contagious jovial aura. We are like in a blind man's bluff, the film begins with a head-scratching hide-and-seek tailing between Julie, a librarian and Celine, an amateurish magician, we will never know from the context whether they are acquaintances before or the first-sight attraction draws them closer, after a chirpy episode of putting out feelers, they lives together in a small apartment, where Celine casually mentions of her unpleasant experience working as a nanny for a mystified ménage-à-trois family, it intrigues Julie's curiosity, from then on, a very unique ghost-house yarn has been ingeniously unveiled through Celine and Julie's multiple impersonations as the reserved nanny in a boudoir drama. The film is such a pioneer in its blending liberal modus operandi of whimsicality (the first half looks like everything is done impromptu) with elaborately calculated ad hoc murder scheme, Celine and Julie's laid-back and bubbly kindred spirit permeates the film and modulates its rhythm and pulse up to a labyrinthine fantasy, utterly absorbing and an influential progenitor to many future rule-breakers (MEMENTO 1999, 10/10 for instance). It is a diptych in its cinematographic style as well, the insouciant nouvelle vague influence vs. a multi-angle observation indoors, which magnify Berto and Labourier's disparate temperaments, intensify Ogier and Pisier's distinctive mystique and functionally wrap us up into this whodunit during the long-haul. Meanwhile, Rivette adequately leaves viewers many open threads to chew on, like the jumpy inter-cutting of the shots in the house during Celine's magic show, is a perplexing maneuver to lure us into the mystery, and it works. Also, one snippet when they let a coin to decide whose turn to visit the mansion, Julie cannily says "head I win, tail you lose", one should not miss the ephemeral stimulation which plainly gives more credits than its ostensible spontaneity.At first glance, its 193 minutes running time looks daunting, but as I watched it separately in two days, it turned out pretty well. It is a film can wholly alter one's notion of story-telling in an anti-cinematic methodology, and Rivette pulls it off effortlessly, a must-see for all thirsty film gourmets plus, it has a sterling ending which will make all its time worth the wait.

In the book of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die there are some easy titles to remember, and also some titles that mislead or confuse you into what they may be about, and this French film had a bit of both, and I did watch it, from director Jacques Rivette (La Belle Noiseuse). Basically Julie (Dominique Labourier) is reading a book about magic spells, and a woman, Celine (Juliet Berto), walks past dropping various possessions, and she follows her picking them up and seeing where she goes, at one point she loses her, but they catch up with each other. Eventually Celine has moved in with Julie, and they go out to various places using each other's identities, including Celine meeting Julie's childhood sweetheart, and Julie filling in for a cabaret audition for Celine. They are also seen separately visiting a quiet and walled off mansion, seemingly empty, and these visits become repetitive, each entering and disappearing for some time, one of the times they somehow get a special kind of candy. This candy enables Celine and Julie to transport into the house and an alternative reality, seeing the lives of supposedly the house residents, and as they suck the sweets and try to solve a mystery concerning the people. Besides seeing all this stuff Celine and Julie relax by going boating on a placid river with young girl Madlyn (Nathalie Asnar), but by the end of the film you find out that Celine did not leave the bench she was sitting on at the beginning, it was all an Alice in Wonderland style dream, and Julie does walk past again, so she picks up her possessions and presumably it will all happen again. Also starring Marie-France Pisier as Sophie, Barbet Schroeder as Olivier, Philippe Clévenot as Guilou and Marie-Thérèse Saussure as Poupie. Lebourier and Berto give interesting performance, my only problem with this film is that I had pretty much no idea what was going on, it was really confusing; it is only afterwards I can see some of the resemblances to Alice in Wonderland, and I can't agree with the critics' five stars. But there were certainly moments to catch your eye; I would say this is for those who really pay attention to things, but it is not a bad experimental supernatural drama. Worth watching, in my opinion!

I saw "Céline et Julie vont en bateau" a few years after watching "3 Women" and Claudia Weill's "Girlfriends." The next day I saw it again, and then again and again... This was a time when I was very interested in the depiction of modern women in films: some were quite original and revealing, and this was indeed one of them, dealing with the creative process, and women's imagination. Made in 1974, it had a similar origin as that of "3 Women", in which the female cast (Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, and Marie-France Pisier) worked with director Rivette and writer Eduardo de Gregorio on the script. It is also a story of female bonding and solidarity, but instead of relying on dreams, it uses magic and literary sources, Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" being the first to come to mind. Librarian Julie (Labourier) becomes intrigued by weird rabbit-like magician Céline (Berto), but soon one is after the other. They become friends (or sort of) and exchange roles in each other's life, but nobody seems to notice the difference. Then Céline reveals she frequently goes inside an old house where a melodrama is repeated on and on (based on Henry James' "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes" and "The Other House"), enacted by two women (Ogier, Pisier) who are both in love with a very pale man (filmmaker Barbet Schroeder.) In the old house there is also a little girl (Nathalie Asnar) who is in danger, so Céline and Julie become the "phantom ladies" of the title (including Fantômas outfits) to rescue her. This post-modern movie is a puzzle, and the audience is intellectually involved in the making. Critics went crazy and called it "the most important film made since 'Citizen Kane'." I don't know if it is, but I love it: it is funny, demanding, entertaining, and sometimes boring, in the best tradition of Satie's repetitive "Vexations". Reworked as "Desperately Seeking Susan", without acknowledging it.