Céline and Julie Go Boating (French: Céline et Julie vont en bateau) is a 1974 French film directed by Jacques Rivette.
Shot casually in a documentary style, we see a red-haired woman—we will learn that it is Julie (Dominique Labourier)--sitting on a bench in a pleasant but rather non-descript Parisian park. She is reading a book, we can see, on magic incantations. But after a few minutes of random looks around the park—children playing, a cat on the prowl for pigeons—Julie is suddenly taken by the sight of a lithe woman woozily staggering across the park, a long scarf dangling from her neck. No one else seems to notice the dazed woman when she drops that scarf except for Julie, who leaps up from her park bench. She calls after her. Julie will chase after Céline (Juliet Berto), at first seemingly only on the mundane task of returning a dropped scarf. But with just that simple act, the magic of the narrative—both of this particular story and, in Rivette's meta-approach, that of cinema itself—begins.
The film won the Special Prize of the Jury at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1974 and was an Official Selection at the 1974 New York Film Festival.
Synopsis
The film begins with Julie sitting on a park bench reading a book of magic spells when a woman (Céline) walks past, and begins dropping (à la Carroll's White Rabbit) various possessions. Julie begins picking them up, and tries to follow Céline around Paris, sometimes at a great pace (for instance, sprinting up Montmartre to keep pace with Céline's tram). After adventures following Céline around the Parisian streets--at one point it looks as if they have gone their separate ways, never to meet up again—Céline finally decides to move in with Julie. There are incidents of identity swapping— with Céline pretending to be Julie to meet the latter's childhood sweetheart, for example, and Julie attempting to fill in for Céline at a cabaret audition (in each case, with hilarious consequences).
The second half of the film centers around the duo's individual visits to 7 bis, rue de Nadir aux Pommes, the address of a mansion in a quiet, walled off grounds in Paris. While seemingly empty and closed in the present day, the house is yet where Céline realizes she knows as the place where she works as a nanny for a family—two jealous sisters, one widower, and a sickly child--that appears in their dress and language to be from another time, perhaps the early 20th Century. Soon, a repetitive pattern emerges: Céline or Julie enters the house, disappears for a time, and then is suddenly ejected by unseen hands back to present day Paris later that same day. Each time either Céline or Julie is exhausted, having forgotten everything that has happened during their time in the house. However, each time upon returning via a taxi the women discover a candy mysteriously lodged in their mouth. It seems to be important, so each makes sure to carefully save the candy. At one point, they realize that the candy is a key to the other place and time; sucking on the sweet transports them back to the house's alternate reality (in this case a double reference to both Carroll and to Proust's madeleine) of the day's events.
The remainder of the film consists of the pair attempting to solve the central mystery of the house: amidst the jealous conniving of women of the house over the attentions of the widower, a young child is mysteriously murdered. But this narrative is one that repeats like a stage play, with exact phrases they soon learn well enough to start joking about. Each time they repeat eating the candy, they remember more of the day's events. Just as if reading a favorite novel, or again watching a beloved movie, they find that they can enter the narrative itself, with each twist and turn memorized. Far from being the passive viewers/readers that they were at first—and most movie viewers always are—the women come to realize that they can seize hold of the story, changing it as they wish.
Now, even as the plot continues to unfold in its clockwork fashion, the women begin to take control, making it 'interactive' by adding alterations to their dialogues and inserting different actions into the events unreeling in the house. Finally, in a true act of authorship, they change the ending, and rescue the young girl who was originally murdered. Both realities are fully conjoined when, after their rescue of the girl from the House of Fiction, the two not only discover themselves transported back in Julie's apartment, but this time it isn't another 'waking dream' for the young girl, Madlyn, has joined them, safely back in 1970s Paris.
What to do after that exhausting incursion into an alternate reality but to relax? To that end, Céline, Julie, and Madlyn take a rowboat on a placid river, rowing and gliding happily along. But something isn't quite right. They go silent upon seeing another boat quickly coming to pass them on the water. On that boat we see the three main protagonists from the house-of-another-time: that alternate reality has followed them back to their world. But Céline, Julie, and Madlyn see them as the antique props they are, frozen in place, clothes and make-up glaringly out of time.
The film ends—or seems to, for aren't we back in the familiar park that everything began in?—as we watch Céline this time, half nodding off on a park bench, who catches sight of Julie hurrying past her, who in her White Rabbit way, drops her magic book. What is she to do? Céline does what she must—picking up the book, she calls and runs after Julie.
Themes
Magic is one of the themes of the film. Céline, the fetchingly clad stage magician, does her pedestrian but somehow still engaging magic tricks in a nightclub performance, pouting and making faces as necessary. Magic seems to come too from Julie's Tarot card readings. Finally, "real" magic comes from the design of a potion, which enables both women to enter the house and take charge of the narrative.
The film can be said to move from realism to magic, from the beginnings as a documentary-style film about two women in Paris to the staged unreal world of the characters in the house. At the start, the two women are leading relatively conventional lives, each having jobs (Julie, a librarian, is more conservative and sensible than Céline, a stage magician, with her lifestyle of bohemianism). The early scenes show the streets of Paris, marketplaces, and the steps and railway of Montmartre, which are shot in straight forward, realistic style favored by the nouvelle vague. But as the film develops, Céline and Julie separate from the world by leaving their jobs, moving in together, and gradually becoming obsessed with the mysterious and magical events in the old house.
A psychic link develops between the two women. In one scene, according to critic Irina Janakievska, Julie is playing Tarot cards, with one of the cards interpreted as signifying that Julie's future is behind her—exactly when we see Céline, wearing a disguise, observing Julie from one of the library desks. As Céline draws an outline of her hand in one of the books, notes the critic, Julie echoes that as she plays with a red ink pad.[1]
Another theme is memory, most obviously in the way events from the house are only remembered after the women have left, but only after some memory trigger occurs. For example, Julie spends all of one day in the house, but when she leaves, she has amnesia. It is only by sucking on the magic sweet that the events she has witnessed return to her as flashbacks. At first the glimpses of a story are illogical and incoherent, but the two friends gradually piece them together into a narrative, and try to uncover the secrets being hidden from them, most importantly, who killed the little girl?
As each scene develops into its own set piece, we discover that we are in a world of play. Play exists here in many different forms: we begin and end the film in a park, for example, and parks encourage us to relax, to play, get lost in a reverie, or to try out new things. At a later stage we're in yet another Parisian park on still another impromptu stage: here is where Céline fools a long lost lover of Julie's so that he thinks he is meeting Julie-who-still-loves-him—for he wants to propose marriage—but the trick is that Céline will dash his particular dream, keeping Julie for herself.
Another noticeable aspect of the film is its liberal use of puns, something readers of Lewis Carroll's books will certainly be familiar with. Most of them work only in French, although the translators have done a reputable job of rendering them into English. For instance, the title of the film,Céline et Julie vont en bateau has other meanings from that of taking a boat ride: "aller en bateau" also means "to get caught up in a story that someone is telling you", or, as we say in English, getting taken up in a "shaggy dog story".
Cast
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- Anne Zamire - Lil
- Jean Douchet - M'sieur Dede
- Adèle Taffetas - Alice
- Monique Clément - Myrtille
- Jérôme Richard - Julien
- Michael Graham - Boris
- Jean-Marie Sénia - Cyrille
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References
External links
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The films of Jacques Rivette |
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| 1960s |
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| 1970s |
Out 1 (1971) • Out 1: Spectre (1974) • Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) • Noroît (1976) • Duelle (une quarantaine) (1976)
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| 1980s |
Merry-Go-Round (1981) • Le pont du Nord (1981) • Love on the Ground (1984) • Hurlevent (1985) • Gang of Four (1988)
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| 1990s |
La Belle Noiseuse (1991) • Divertimento (1991) • Joan the Maiden, Part 1: The Battles (1994) • Joan the Maiden, Part 2: The Prisons (1994) • Up, Down, Fragile (1995) • Secret Defense (1998)
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| 2000s |
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| Shorts |
At the Four Corners (1949) • The Quadrille (1950) • The Diversion (1952) • Fool's Mate (1956) • Paris Goes Away (1981) • Une aventure de Ninon (1995)
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