Céline and Julie Go Boating

Julie, a librarian, gathers up things dropped by a woman running through the park and follows her. The woman is Céline, a magician. They meet, start living together and enter a strange house in the city. When they come out they remember nothing; only a sweet is left in their mouths. Sucking it, they watch what they saw in the house like a film: the same melodrama, the same scenes each time, ending in the death of a child. The film is not interested in plot. It is interested in the game: Céline and Julie keep going back into the story in the house and trying to break its script. Two women watching a film intervene in it. The form is loose and long: 193 minutes, scenes open to improvisation, Paris streets and theatrical passages in the house. The actors took part directly in writing the text. Jacques Rivette directed. The film counts among the furthest reaches of playfulness in French cinema and has been named an influence by many directors since. Juliet Berto plays Céline, Dominique Labourier plays Julie, and Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier the women in the house. Who it is for: viewers who like experimental narrative and the late French New Wave. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot take the length. It runs past three hours, its repetitions are deliberately tiring and nothing is explained.