Celine and Julie go Boating

 Highly acclaimed (particularly by David Thomson), Jacques Rivette's 1974 Celine and Julie go Boating has been well-nigh impossible to watch for 40 years.  I know that I saw the picture when I was in college and was completely baffled by it.  I must have been living near campus when the picture was shown at the University Film Society because I would surely have missed the late bus back to Eden Prairie if travel back to my parent's home had been required.  The movie clocks in at 193 minutes and, almost certainly, I would have been late to the downtown bus connections necessary to transport me back to the remote suburb where I lived during most of the time I attended college.  In those days, long movies always made be nervous because late-night connections between the 16 bus (campus to Hennepin Avenue) and the 12 bus out to the far west suburbs (as Eden Prairie was considered in the mid-seventies) were tenuous -- if I arrived downtown after 12:15, I might be stranded with the pimps and whores, the deranged Vietnam vets and drunks on Hennepin.  Adding to my anxiety was the fact that films shown at the U Film Society were almost never screened on time, often subject to technical delays and would only be shown after the audience had viewed several "coming attractions" notes scribbled in black magic marker on plastic roasting under an opaque projector in the projection booth.  These notes were often illegible, with bizarre phrasing and weird spelling errors, and the subject of much hilarity in the audience -- except for me: every minute lost trying to decipher Al Milgrom's handwriting on the slide was a minute that might cause me to miss my transfer in downtown Minneapolis.  (Al Milgrom was for many, many years -- probably almost 60 -- the proprietor of the University Film Society; he knew people like Jean-Luc Godard and Werner Herzog by first name.) 

Rivette was the most disciplined, rigorous and austere of the French Nouvelle Vague directors.  Andre Tarkovsky wrote a book about cinema called Sculpting in Time and this poetic description applies to Rivette's movies.  Several of his films are enormously long -- Out 1 is more than 13 hours long; his most famous picture La Belle Noiseuse  also runs for more than three hours -- it's about the same length as Celine and Julie go Boating.  Rivette's movie about Joan of Arc was also very long and released as two full feature-length pictures.  Celine and Julie is daunting because it, often, seems a bit like a home-movie -- some of the performances are amateurish and improvised and the location camera-work is sometimes sketchy almost most of the film is very handsome, pretty in an Impressionistic style that seems to come naturally to French directors. (The film looked grainy and washed-out when I saw it 45 years ago -- this is because the picture was shot on 16mm blown up to 35mm format.  The Criterion transfer, however, is ravishing).  Rivette's highly abstract and cerebral mise-en-scene is enlivened by the performances of his two leading ladies.  The director is obviously in love with them and his camera reflects his adoration.  If the film were shorter, Celine and Julie would probably be Rivette's most accessible and engaging picture since, if nothing else, spectators will be charmed by the actresses featured in the movie.  But Rivette also indulges his stars and lets them mug for the camera -- Celine in particular exploits her huge eyes and waifish features in a way that some viewers might find distasteful.  I like the actress in this picture -- she's is a French version of a very young Sissy Spacek -- but her performance is often over-the-top and too whimsically saccharine to be acceptable to viewers more hard-nosed than this writer.  Juliet Berto, who plays Celine, channels Charlie Chaplin somehow fused with Audrey Hepburn:  she's like a sexualized "little Tramp".  A little of this goes a long way and the movie is three hours and 13 minutes long.  Dominique Labourier as Julie, a hoydenish redhead, is less irritating -- but she is also encouraged to overact in a number of scenes.  Since Celine and Julie are on-screen for the entirety of the film, a viewer's tolerance for their quirky acting in this film is a prerequisite for admiring the picture.  The film, sometimes, implies a lesbian relationship between the two women but, in fact, their behavior in the film, although often highly seductive, is really pre-sexual.  They act like little girls on an adventure, a bit like the female characters in Lynch's Blue Velvet (particularly Laura Dern), Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive.  In many ways, the movie seems to have had a  decisive impact on David Lynch -- it's obvious that his films bear the imprint of Celine and Julie  particular with respect to some the bizarre musical numbers in the picture and Nancy Drew mystery elements integral to the film's plot.  In effect, Celine and Julie are two Girl Scouts who work together (and have a good time) solving a strange mystery.

Julie, a librarian is aestivating in one of those eerie, empty and wind-swept public parks somewhere in Paris.  She is reading a book about magic and inscribes a sort of pentagram in the sand under her park bench.  The breeze stirs the trees in a mysterious way and, then, we see Celine, a kind of phantom apparition, all feathers and boas, darting across the park. (She seems a spirit like Ariel from Shakespeare's Tempest summoned by the pentagram and flitting through the square.  Intrigued Julie chases Celine when she drops her sunglasses in the pink sand and, like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, the apparition draws her down a rabbit-hole, in this case, a kind of chutes and ladders pursuit through Paris -- this scene is set in Montmartre and Rivette's Paris is equipped with all sorts of ladder-like steps and deep wooded declivities.  The pursuit is scrupulously observed but unnatural -- for instance, when Celine rides a funicular up to the summit of Sacre Couer in Montmartre, Julie keeps pace effortlessly running alongside the ascending car.  I've climbed some of those steps in Montmartre and it would be very, very difficult to run quickly enough to keep pace with the tram climbing the hillside -- particularly in the sweltering heat that the film depicts.  The two women don't speak with one another until 26 minutes have elapsed.  In the meantime, we have learned that Celine states her profession to be "magician" and that Julie is a librarian in very typically French library -- patrons are encouraged to smoke so long as they do so discretely.  Celine encounters Julie, at last, at her apartment and, at about the half hour mark, the plot, as it were, begins to develop albeit very deliberately.

Julie and Celine complete one another's sentences and seem to be able to anticipate each other's thoughts.  The film suggests that they are two aspects of a single sensibility and they are shown to be linked in innumerable ways.  (When Celine can't appear at a cabaret where she does magic tricks, Julie takes over for her -- both women are astonishingly incompetent as performers:  Celine's magic tricks are risible and Julie's singing is off-key and arhythmic.)  In one scene, Celine meets Julie's boyfriend (wearing an implausible red wig) and the man, thinking she is his beloved, proposes to her complete with a chivalric bend of the knee and ring -- Celine tells him to go and "masturbate in the roses", blithely giving the ring to some other girl sitting in the public square. (Julie doesn't seem to care; and when Celine's boyfriend calls, she imitates the other woman and breaks up with him, encouraging the suitor to "masturbate in the daisies.") Rivette is at pains to show that Celine is a liar or, more charitably, a fabulist -- he stages two long sequences in which the young woman spins elaborate and ridiculous lies.  However, Julie seems to take at face value, Celine's account that she has fled from a mysterious household where there is a child, two women, and a domineering man -- and that these people are now pursuing her.  While Celine is cavorting with Julie's boyfriend, Julie goes to the mysterious house, an ivy-clad gothic heap of brick at the center of a secret garden.  Coming from that place some time later, Julie is amnesiac -- she can't recall what happened to her when she was in the house and, during Celine's cabaret show -- the magician dressed like an emaciated Marlene Dietrich with a top hat and fishnet stockings up to her crotch -- Julie has flashbacks to strange and sinister events taking place in the dwelling in the suburbs.  Gradually, we come to understand that the house contains personages involved in a melodramatic narrative that has a texture completely different from the rather happenstance and quotidian events involving Julie and Celine:  a man has made a vow to his dying wife that he will never betray her with another woman at least while their child Madlyn is alive; but he is living with his dead wife's seductive sister, Camille, and his own sister who appears to harbor incestuous desires for him; Madlyn is sickly and under the care of a nurse named Angele -- the nurse is alternately played by Celine or Julie who appear in that role in the ghostly mise-en-scene in the gloomy house.  This melodrama embedded within the film has the character of one of Celine's elaborate fabrications, but is also derived from certain memories that Julie retains from her childhood -- in other words, the gothic tale seems to be a  joint creation by the two women, a sort of folie a deux.  The girls set about to investigate this melodrama and, after each adventure in the haunted house (they take  turns going there), they return with more details as to the narrative unfolding in that place -- the girls also return with a red bloody handprint on their shoulders after escapade, something like the letter "M" marked on the back of Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang's movie.  Access to events in the house is secured by an aid to memory,, like the madeleine in Proust -- in this case, it's a magical lifesaver (or "sweet" candy) that the women find tucked under the tongue after their exhausting excursions.  The story in the house is odd on many levels -- it is said to be taking place in New England and involves a trunk of clothes that the dead woman has left in the attic and that is off-limits until Camille opens it and dresses like deceased in order to seduce the man.  Apparently, someone murders the little girl to free the widower from his vow of chastity.  (The story in the house is apparently based on an 1896 novel by Henry James The Other House.)  The actors within the story are like sleepwalkers trapped in an endless time-loop --events in the house  recur over and over again, the only variant being the identity of the taciturn nurse who is sometimes Julie and sometimes Celine.  Ultimately, the heroines decide to take action to save the child in the home who keeps getting murdered.  The film's middle ninety minutes involve Celine and Julie slowly piecing  together the story underway in the haunted house.  In the film's last forty minutes, they both go to the home and interrupt the story underway there.  The dreamwalking actors in the ghost story are filmed from odd, indeterminate angles in this part of the movie and their faces are covered with white and grey paste like actors in a Kabuki play.  They seem to wind down like mechanical automatons as Julie and Celine mug with them and try to disrupt their sleepwalking-- although the figures trapped in the gruesome story don't notice the two girls; the women are literally invaders from another narrative and can't be seen by the dying actors in the house.  There are some amusing effects in the last episode in the house -- one of the girls misses her cue as Angele, the silent nurse, because she's been using the toilet.  Celine puts a paper crown on the melancholy male figure -- he continues to recite his lines without noticing the crown on his head.  When the figures in the story engage in a sort Totentanz, a macabre waltz, Julie and Celine put a tango record on the player and dance manically alongside the robotic characters in the embedded story.  At last, the girls flee the house with the little girl in tow and go boating.  The scenes with the rowboat are filmed in gorgeous, luminous light and, as Julie rows upstream with Celine and Madlyn whom they have rescued at their prow, they see the man and the two women from the  haunted house, standing like figures in a tableaux as the current carries them in their boat downstream.  The film's last scene explains the movie's enigmatic opening title "Usually it begins like this --"  We see Celine now aestivating in the sultry park.  When she looks up from the book that she is reading, Celine sees Julie fleeing through the park; Julie drops something and Celine begins to pursue her.  In other words, just as the figures in the haunted house were trapped in a tragic narrative, Celine and Julie are embedded in a time-loop that is more whimsical, but, nonetheless, a narrative from which they can not escape -- that narrative, of course, is the movie we have been watching.  

The surface texture of the movie is dense with allusions and thematic motifs.  Julie is a red head; she makes a bloody Mary for Celine who has a bloody, scuffed knee -- the blonde woman in the haunted house cuts her hand on a champagne flute and Julie tends to that wound (as does Celine alternatively); Julie keeps a red hand effigy in her apartment; the book of magic that she reads has a bright red cover...and so on.  Locked trunks, symbolic of repressed memories, are repeatedly opened -- they are full of extravagant numbers of dolls.  The movie is full of dolls and marionettes and puppets, suggesting, it seems, that the characters are all puppets in the hands of the narrator (and film director).  There are innumerable references to other movies -- Rivette was a film critic before he became a director and we can see the entire history of cinema in various aspects of the picture, from Feuillade's silent serials (the film is subtitled "Phantom Ladies over Paris") through Hitchcock to the Czech new wave director Vera Chytilova whose film Daisies is decisive as to the appearance and staging of scenes with the two heroines.  At times, the girls stare at the camera while recalling events in the haunted house; it's as if they are fixedly watching a movie.  On all levels, the film is fascinating but its extreme length, part of the movie's curious immersive appeal, really can't be justified.  I have a bus to catch somewhere and this movie is taking too much of my time.  As with many of Rivette's films, the mood of mystery, sinister conspiracy, and magical arcana suggest that something extraordinary is about to occur -- but Rivette doesn't really deliver on that promise.  The movie is remarkable but, also, a bit tedious and the final pay-off doesn't seem commensurate to all of the work required of the viewer.  That said, most critics regard Celine and Julie go Boating as sublime and, viewed in a certain light, those opinions seem plausible to me -- I just don't wholly share them.