Watch Céline and Julie Go Boating For Free

Good start, but then it gets ruined

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Having read about this movie I decided to give it a go, even though the plot didn't seem to exist in any way that could keep you interested for 30 minutes, let alone 195. I like distinctive and different films, sprinkled with surrealism, as much as I like popular classic cinema, but there has to be something that drives the story, and keeps a viewer follow it through. If the story hangs on a thin line, there has to be something other truly mesmerizing (photography, set design, etc.),that pushes a movie to another level. A series of self indulgent drama class exercises, that drag on for more than three hours, testing the patience of best-intentioned and most willing viewer to it's outer limits, is what happens in Celine and Julie. This is a sort of a movie, that has so little to offer, that your mind keeps wondering to all other places but the screen. Two leading actresses play with each other, and it drags on and on, in most parts looking like a student film of an overly ambitious but less talented student. The trick is, they keep student films to under one hour in duration, and it should have been done with this one, it might have improved it's quality. Story of mysterious house in which strange things happen is marred by silly pastiches of unexplained and often absurd actions two leading ladies undertake, in an effort to solve the mystery that has a self serving purpose, same as the movie which is trying too hard to be incomprehensible, in order to be different. And it succeeds. Whatever frenzied gallery of scenes that have no meaning for the general audience, is shown to you, and the least you understand the intentions and ideas of so called "auteur", more it will be considered by many outside of their intellectual capacity, thus, probably representing something really extraordinary.Borrowing heavily from Sedmikrásky (1966), Vera Chytilova's pearl of the Czech new wave and world cinema, Jacques Rivette, couldn't emulate it's freshness, playfulness and cinematography, simply because he didn't have the ability, and because he lost any direction he could have had, when he passed the magic mark of about 76 minutes, after which, these fountains of ideas turn to stone. Difference is coherent uniqueness, difference is Kubrick, Teshighara, Clouzot, Truffaut, Kaurismäki. Surrealist is Bunuel, Cocteau, Ferreri... Distinctive is Polanski, Allen, Melville, Hitchcock, Welles. This one is not. No plot, no cinematography, no ideas and several pretty scenes is all there is. Nothing to justify three hours of your life. Avoid.

Okay, some of the films we cherish as classics seem to unfold straightforward narrative as a means of making human destiny known to us, even briefly. What sacrifices to make to reach what actually matters. Seven Samurai, Lawrence; the transformation is always tucked out of sight, inferred. Instead we see the transformed being struggle in the world of organized inadequacies.More sophisticated films enter the place were narrative is formed so that we can have tangible insight of our place in it (and our role in creating it). This is a type of film I am seeking, that places consciousness within itself to give us actual in-sight, where what we see is, itself, the transformation taking place. It always comes back to seeing inside, where the purging must take place. To the place that Nicholas of Cusa describes as obscured by a 'wall of paradise' constituted by the coincidence of opposites (good and evil, being and nonbeing) which conceal from us the divine. A place seemingly inaccessible, as Zen teaches about the level where things arise and disappear being unattainable, but only because guarded by the mechanisms of reason.Fairy-tales are perhaps the earliest narrative form where those mechanisms are bended to allow passage into the unreal. A geography vaguely recognizable but skewed with portents that suggest spontaneous arisal. What narrative we find in a fairy-tale, indeed like every narrative, is only our means of navigating images, images that make inherent sense as picture language.We have one such modern fairy-tale here, about two girls drawn to the pursuit of mysterious adventure in modern Paris. Magic happenstance in a world of fiction and limitless possibility.But notice how Rivette pursues his way through the coincidence of opposites. Two girls who are really figments of the one mind, the mind daydreaming the entire movie. Who not so strangely then behave like lifelong friends when they were seemingly introduced at the start of the movie.Two girls who each adopts the other's guise as a way to eliminate for the other the anxieties and responsibilities of adulthood that would threaten to yank them from this magical world. By impersonating one another, Celine chases Julie's boyfriend away, Julie foils Celine's plans for a vaudeville tour in the Middle East.This is the first half of the movie, delightfully carefree and radiating with improvised discovery. It plays a lot like the Czech film Daisies from '66. Unlike Vera Chytilova's film though that riffed on a simple feminist rebellion, this is complex, structured stuff that delves deeper.Nested inside the one fiction is another, which the two girls taking turns explore inside a mysterious house. This second narrative is a parody of soap opera (itself an unintentional camp about adult responsibility), hysterical stuff about obsession and illicit love involving a husband, mistress, and the presence of a dead wife. The two girls watch from outside, as though shaping the story. They guffaw at the overwrought histrionics or become distracted by boredom; more importantly they participate.So, having persisted in this magical childhood world, here they devise the circumstances that will permit them to assume responsibility for saving a young daughter (an inner child) from a suffocating household life. Circumstances of a boring life that perhaps begat the imaginative flight back into childhood in the first place.Eventually we surface back to the level of reality where, true to the cyclical rule of self-referential fiction, it all starts again. So that the life-centering, life-renewal rites that restore balance inside can be performed again.The actual stuff of the movie could have fit in half the length. But it's the other half of extraneous wandering bubbling with excitement that makes it all breathe with vitality. Compare to how constricted feels Resnais' Je t'aime.

Perhaps it goes without saying that Celine and Julie is a terrific riff on Alice in Wonderland, but FYI, I'll reiterate it and give a few details. Julie chasing Celine at the outset = Alice following the March Hare hurrying down the rabbit hole. There's a (Cheshire) cat, of course. EAT ME and DRINK ME are key instructions throughout. There's even a tea party, complete with over-sized utensils.This superb, incomparable movie is a thing of wonder for sure. And of all the feminist and quasi-feminist works of art of the period, I don't know of another that revels so delightfully in the sheer fun of being a girl and/or women (and that blurs the differences between the two so tellingly). I also can't think of another film that has so much twisted fun with the ritual of watching TV (the only thing better than following the melodrama playing out in C&J's minds is watching their reactions to it).Two caveats: Much as I love long movies, C&J is a bit overlong - the boudoir melodrama plays out a bit more than it has to, and loses some of its fascination as a result. And Labourier's performance in the last third turns somewhat arch and cutesy (NOT in her "audition" scene, however, which is for the most part wonderful).Lastly, I'm again struck with wonder at the New Wave filmmakers' ability to make something extraordinary out of next to nothing. No fancy sets or costumes (the production even in the upperclass melodrama sections is refreshingly threadbare), plenty of available light, no special effects of any kind. Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, etc, were Dogma avant la lettre, without being, er, dogmatic about it. One can pore over their self-referential filmic-ness all one wants, but what they give us so generously is real people (stars deglamorized without constantly nudging us in the ribs for congratulation) and real places. Cinema that gives us the world.C&J, like all the best of the school, is something lived in.

Just saw this film again. It must have been 30 years ago (gulp!) that I saw it last but I had such fond memories I had to drive across Scotland to see it in the art house film theatre that was finally showing it again. The film quality was very suspect - it must have been the original film print (ie the one I saw 30 years ago!) or a very dodgy copy. However what a buzz to see the film again! Can't say I noticed the heavy lesbian overtones last time - must have been young and naive. The plot takes a while to settle down but once it decides it's going to be a ghost/lesbian/murder mystery/science fiction/comedy story (!!) it really gets going. As the ghosts in the house are locked in a daily loop, re-enacting the murder of the child, so we see at the end that the film is locked in a bigger loop, when Celine and Julie (finally in a boat) with the rescued girl find the ghosts have dragged them into a cycle where the whole film repeats. They thought they had rescued the girl and broken her out of the loop, only to find that there's no escape and they are all trapped in a bigger loop. But what is the meaning of the interchangeable roles? Celine pretends to be Julie and vice versa at one stage in the story. And in the re-loop of the film at the end we see that we start off with the girls swapping roles. Is it a piece of social comment? - we're all trapped in roles that we repeat every day and these roles are interchangeable, one is as trapped as any other? If life in the film is stuck going round and round forever, doomed to repeat the days of the film like some sort of broken record repeating a song (vinyl - the good old days) - is this the ultimate end of the world film?