Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974): Jacques Rivette’s Innovative, Spellbinding Tale of Female Bonding and Identity Swapping, Starring Dominique Labourier and Juliet Berto

Jacques Rivette, arguably the most innovative and experimental director of the French New Wave, made Céline and Julie Go Boating (French: Céline et Julie vont en bateau: Phantom Ladies Over Paris), starring Dominique Labourier as Julie and Juliet Berto as Céline.

Grade: A (***** out of *****)

Céline and Julie Go Boating: Phantom Ladies Over Paris
Film poster

The film won the Special Prize of the Jury at the Locarno Fest in 1974, and was later an official selection at the N.Y. Film Fest.

Celine and Julie Go Boating tells the magical, mind-bending story of two young French women who find themselves unwittingly thrust into an alternate reality.

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 rather randomly various objects.

Julie begins picking them up, and tries to follow Céline around Paris, sometimes at a great pace (sprinting up Monmartre to keep pace with Céline’s tram).

There are incidents of identity swapping: Céline pretends to be Julie to meet the latter’s childhood sweetheart, and Julie attempts to fill in for Céline at a cabaret audition.

The film’s second half centers on the duo’s individual visits to 7 bis, rue du Nadir-aux-Pommes, 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.

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, the women discover a candy mysteriously lodged in their mouth; each makes sure to carefully save the candy.

They realize that the candy is a key to the other place and time; sucking on it transports them back to the house’s alternative reality (a double reference to both Lewis Carroll and Marcel Proust’s “Madeline”).

The two women attempt to solve the central mystery of the house: amid the jealous conniving of women over the attentions of the widower, a young child is mysteriously murdered.

However, 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. 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 they were at first—and most movie viewers always are—the women realize that they can seize hold of the story, and change it as they wish.

The women begin to take control, making it “interactive” by adding alterations to their dialogues and inserting actions into the events.

Finally, in 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 discover themselves transported back to Julie’s apartment, but this time it isn’t another “waking dream;” Madlyn has joined them safely back in 1970s Paris.

To relax, Céline, Julie, and Madlyn take a boat on placid river, rowing and gliding happily along, but something isn’t right. They go silent upon seeing another boat, in which there are three protagonists from the house-of-another-time.

That alternate reality follows them back to their world, but Céline, Julie, and Madlyn see them as props frozen in place.

The film ends with Céline, half nodding off on a park bench, observing Julie hurrying past her, who in White Rabbit way, drops her magic book. Picking it up, she runs after Julie

Céline does her magic tricks in a nightclub, and magic comes too from Julie’s Tarot card readings. Then, “real” magic comes from a potion, enabling both women to enter the house and take charge of the narrative.

At the start, the two women are leading conventional lives, Julie, a librarian, is more conservative and sensible than Céline, a bohemian stage magician.

As the tale unfolds develops, Céline and Julie separate themselves from the world by leaving their routine jobs, moving in together, and gradually becoming obsessed with the mysterious events in the old house.

Julie is playing Tarot cards–one card signifies that Julie’s future is behind her—when we see Céline, wearing a disguise, observing Julie from a library desk. As Céline draws an outline of her hand in a book, Julie plays with a red ink pad.

The title Céline et Julie vont en bateau has other meanings: “aller en bateau” also means “getting caught up in a story that someone is telling you” or, in English, getting taken up in shaggy dog story.

Dubbed “one of the all-time great hangout comedies, the topsy-turvy film is a perfect example of French New Wave cinema.

Cast

Juliet Berto – Céline
Dominique Labourier – Julie
Bulle Ogier – Camille
Marie-France Pisier – Sophie
Barbet Schroeder – Olivier
Nathalie Asnar – Madlyn
Marie-Thérèse Saussure – Poupie
Philippe Clévenot – Guilou
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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