Cinephiles and bookworms alike will find solace in C\u00e9line and Julie Go Boating<\/em>, wherein Illusionist C\u00e9line (Juliet Berto) encounters librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier), and together they tumble down a Parisian rabbit hole and marry misadventure with time-bending in a quest to unravel the mysteries of a child murder time-loop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If that sounds like a lot to unpack, that\u2019s because it is. C\u00e9line and Julie<\/em> is filled to the brim with plot codexes and narrative labyrinths, each avenue leading to a coda that brings it all back home, ad infinitum. The opening title card reads, \u201cUsually, it began like this\u201d; what we are about to watch is more of a carousel than a horse race. An early scene has Julie minding her own business and reading a book when C\u00e9line, the metaphorical White Rabbit, runs across her path, dropping personal items along the way. Eventually, Julie is drawn to C\u00e9line \u2019s vague depravity, a friendship is forged, and the pair share threads, beds, and entire personas (which makes the film a stellar double feature with Robert Altman\u2019s identity exchange-as-transformation chronicle 3 Women<\/em>). Three hours of runtime later, and the roles are reversed in a cycle both narrative and thematic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the aid of a magical candy with transporting powers, the duo happen upon a beautifully foreboding mansion (\u201cA real morgue,\u201d one of them calls it) on rue du Nadir-aux-Pommes. They watch it at first, as observant as the audience that observes them. They crack jokes, a femme version of Statler and Waldorf uppets in the wings of a stage play. But it\u2019s not enough to be spectators. C\u00e9line and Julie soon choose to penetrate the fantasy space and become active participants in the tale they\u2019re unraveling as one might go to a repertory theater and watch the same classic time and time again, searching for new clues with each viewing. The candy serves as a memory aid in addition to a vehicle (when they leave the house, they immediately forget the bulk of the events that occurred within it), and the women consume more and more of the sweet with every \u201cvisit\u201d in order to piece together the mystery within the Gothic walls of the home. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The characters gaze upon other characters in a story-within-the-story; a pair of catty adult siblings (Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier), a widower (Barbet Schroeder), and a frail child (Nathalie Asnar) interact with each other in perpetual motion like figures in a motorized snow globe. The story is patriarchal-centric, and it doesn\u2019t spoil much to reveal that the protagonists\u2019 active subversion of that narrative is one of the reasons why Rivette\u2019s film is hailed as a feminist gem. More mysterious than Groundhog Day<\/em> (1993) but less sinister than Hideo Nakata\u2019s The Complex<\/em> (2013), the time loop that the family (and by extension, C\u00e9line and Julie) waltzes within is a danse macabre that demands its viewers\u2019 attention as much as one of C\u00e9line \u2019s sleight-of-hand tricks. The family effectively acts as a pseudo-troupe of stage performers, repeating their curtain calls ad infinitum<\/em>. As this continues, the line of demarcation between fiction and reality (and of author and player) blurs increasingly with every rotation. In this respect, C\u00e9line and Julie Go Boating<\/em> is a movie about movies: their joy, their power, and their malleability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The character with the most range is the setting. Through the watchful lens of cinematographer Jacques Renard, Paris extends beyond the theatrical aspect of the winding plot, capturing the vibrating energy of the streets of Montmarte and the sprawling parks that stretch out like a cat in the sun. Outside of the House, the characters\u2019 identity-swap plays out throughout the city: the women are interchangeable as one interacts with the other\u2019s longtime lover in a park, or when they switch places for a cabaret act. The theater expands beyond the House that C\u00e9line and Julie examine and heckle, all the way out to the city limits of their \u201creal world\u201d itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Elaine May did with her unorthodox gangster picture Mikey and Nicky<\/em><\/a> (1976), former Cahiers du Cinema<\/em> critic Rivette trusted his actors to be cognizant of character and continuum, giving the leads co-writing credits. Like Mikey and Nicky<\/em>, the story (adapted, among other influences, from a Henry James novella, The Other House<\/em>) is a potent brew of script and improvisation. Thanks to both, and the real-life friendship of the principal cast, an authentic vitality pirouettes from every scene. Its influence can be found in the work of David Lynch (Mulholland Dr.<\/em> has been read as C\u00e9line and Julie<\/em> with a more explicit queer text) and Susan Seidelman; the latter\u2019s 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan <\/em>follows the identity-swapping exploits of a pair of young women in New York. A high contrast from (albeit with all of the chemistry and magic of) Peter Jackson\u2019s 1994 thriller Heavenly Creatures<\/em>, C\u00e9line and Julie<\/em> treats the \u201cbad influence\u201d archetype as both a liberating and innate part of every woman\u2019s psyche.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes you want a film that bewitches as much as it endears. Through that ensnarement, Rivette motivates us all to follow the rabbit and tap into the creative potential that lies within. A commercial and critical darling in its time, Rivette\u2019s movie snagged the Special Prize of the Jury at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1974. Stateside, it was an Official Selection at the New York Film Festival the same year.\u00a0 And yet, Rivette is not the household name he should be. This week, change that narrative and stream<\/a> C\u00e9line and Julie Go Boating<\/em> on the Criterion Channel. When the semi-annual conversation on female buddy movies resurfaces, there are usual suspects. Thelma and Louise. B.A.P.S. Romy and Michelle\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":586,"featured_media":14121,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399,1381],"tags":[1431,1422,162],"class_list":["post-14118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","category-movies","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/586"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14118"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22825,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14118\/revisions\/22825"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/celine-julie1-1024x576.jpg\")
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