Not quite knowing what to make of a movie can create an unbridgeable amount of distance between it and the confused viewer. But for Jacques Rivette’s thoroughly perplexing, 193-minute Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), bewilderment has a way of feeding its charms — something that would not be possible were it not so playful, if it didn’t seem happy reflecting whichever interpretations its viewers might be moved to assign it. “In Rivette there’s a sense,” James Crawford wrote in Reverse Shot about a decade ago, “not just of watching or duration, both of which are passive ideas, but of actively being put through a process.”
Directed by avowed auteurship skeptic Rivette and co-written with the help of his improvising (but steered as needed) cast — Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, and Marie-France Pisier — Céline and Julie Go Boating immediately announces its slipperiness. Bookwormish redhead Julie (Labourier) is reading a book about magic on a park bench alone when a woman named Céline (Berto) enters her line of sight. Our quick inferences about what Julie, bespectacled and sensibly dressed, might be like clash with the decidedly flashier Céline, who noisily lurches around in a green-blue feather boa and multipatterned skirt. The devil-may-care floppiness of her strides lead her to drop her pair of sunglasses. Julie politely tries to intercept this stranger before she gets too far away. But for reasons never accounted for in the movie, it evolves into a dialogue-free, 15-minute chase across town that mimics the pursuit of the running-late rabbit from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
Amateur magician Céline and librarian Julie continue crossing paths, their interactions teasing in a way that suggests a game of chase whose rules were decided off-camera. Then they’re suddenly roommates who have the sort of comfort around each other that implies people who’ve known each other for years, a shared interest in the occult maybe, as Keith Phipps has posited, a tacit way to make sense of the world after coming of age amid 1960s counterculture. (Or maybe these women are two sides of a personality that have been split, for this movie where anything seems possible, into two distinct people, a conclusion one could come to especially after some identity-swapping that will come later.)
Juliet Berto in Céline and Julie Go Boating.
Céline and Julie Go Boating’s extended opening stretch is like a litmus test, confronting the viewer with a willful evasiveness bound either to frustrate or tantalize. Something closer to legibility arrives later, when the pair realizes that they’re both being drawn to a mysterious, ivy-kissed house whose exterior crawls with wandering cats and kittens. After what seems like a supernatural force coaxes them inside, they’re abruptly kicked out. Their only evidence of being there is dark red hand marks that appear on their backs, hard candies that have been thumbed into their mouths by someone unknown, and flickering memories of being live-in nurses for a monied family with a toxic dynamic that apparently lives inside.
In their recollections, which Rivette based on the 1896 Henry James novella The Other House, Céline and Julie are employed by two sisters gussied in Old Hollywood siren finery (Ogier and Pisier) who’re vying for the affections of a widower who also lives there (Barbet Schroeder, Ogier’s filmmaker husband and the movie’s producer). It materializes that the widower’s young daughter, also living in the house (Nathalie Asner), will be mysteriously murdered by one of them amid all the melodramatic scheming.
Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier in Céline and Julie Go Boating.
Played with hard-to-resist adventurousness by real-life friends (and roommates during production) Berto and Labourier, whose antics you want to join in on, Céline and Julie come across as movie characters who become hip to the fact that they’re movie characters. The trickiness of their relationship in introductory scenes seems like Rivette and his actor collaborators’ way of laying bare how vulnerable they are to the whims of the people who have created them. Their eventual ability to control, in what look like dream states, what’s going on in the mystical house they keep misguidedly going inside of — a hack they figure out by immediately taking the candies shoved in their mouths out and saving them for later — seems like their way of futzing with the storyline they’ve been forced into. It’s a kind of cathartic revenge for not-very-autonomous fictional characters to take back some control. Seeing two women exert a new level of power over their destinies — and also the destiny of a younger female character they want to save from the conniving adults around her — gives the movie a feminist frisson, too.
Céline and Julie Go Boating’s feeling of mutability also makes it seem like it could be about more than that: a metaphor for the creative process, moments of momentum-pushing inspiration stood in for by the sucking of consciousness-shifting, gem-colored sweets; the way a strong-enough friendship can galvanize those who’re part of it to be better equipped to resist life’s abasements. (One memorable scene where we see Céline hanging out with a different, never-seen-again group of supposed friends who chalk up her yen for wild storytelling as a symptom of pathological lying only makes it more touching that Julie not only is enchanted by her friend’s idiosyncrasies, but also seems to find inspiration from them, steadily loosening up following a moment during which a tarot reading basically tells her that her life has gone stagnant.)
But Céline and Julie Go Boating makes you want to resist concretely deciding that it’s “about” anything in particular, not least because its discursive dialogue and the performances themselves feel too encumbered to be restricted by rigid interpretation. It has an impish quality that more than implies the fun its director and cast were having making things up as they went along, aware of conventional moviemaking dictates and gleefully turning the other cheek to find their own. “The spirit was that of a kindergarten putting on its year-end show for the grown-ups!” Berto wrote in an essay around the time of the movie’s release. “We didn’t have a message. We wanted to create a performance film, a magical film.” Made by a filmmaker reverential of One Thousand and One Night’s making-it-up-as-she-goes-along storyteller Scheherazade, it’s a movie where “play is a life force,” Beatrice Loayza wrote a few years ago, “pleasure is a form of liberation.”
Peterson Reviews 