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This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original article was on Celine and Julie Go Boating. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with MOVIEPEDIA, the text of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. |
Céline and Julie Go Boating (French: Céline et Julie vont en bateau: Phantom Ladies Over Paris) is a 1974 French film co-written and directed by Jacques Rivette.
As the film begins, 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.
Plot[]
Julie is sitting on a park bench reading a book of magic spells when Céline walks past and begins dropping various possessions (à la Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit). Julie picks them up and tries to follow Céline around Paris, sometimes at a fast pace (for instance, sprinting up the stairs of the Rue Foyatier in Montmartre to keep up with Céline's funicular). After adventures following Céline through the Parisian streets—at one point it seems as though they have gone their separate ways, never to meet again—Céline ultimately moves in with Julie. There are incidents of identity swapping, such as Céline pretending to be Julie to meet the latter's childhood sweetheart, and Julie attempting to substitute for Céline at a cabaret audition.
Céline and Julie make individual visits to 7 bis, rue du Nadir-aux-Pommes, the address of a mansion set in quiet, walled-off grounds in Paris. Although seemingly empty and closed in the present day, the house is where Céline realises she knows as the place where she works as a nanny for a family—two jealous sisters, one widower and a sickly child. Soon, a repetitive pattern emerges: Céline or Julie enters the house, disappears for a time, and is then 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 by taxi, the women discover a candy mysteriously lodged in their mouth. It seems important, so each ensures to carefully save the candy. At one point, they realise that the candy is a key to the other place and time; sucking on the sweet transports them back to the house's alternative reality (a double reference to both Lewis Carroll and Marcel Proust's madeleine) of the day's events.
The two women attempt to solve the central mystery of the house: amid the jealous conniving of the women of the house over the attentions of the widower, a young child is mysteriously murdered. This narrative repeats like a stage play, with exact phrases they soon learn well enough to start joking about. Each time they eat the candy, they remember more of the day's events. Just as when reading a favourite novel or watching a beloved film, they find they can enter the narrative itself, with each twist and turn memorised. Far from being the passive viewers/readers they were at first, the women come to realise that they can seize hold of the story, changing it as they wish.
Céline and Julie begin to take control of the narrative, making it "interactive" by altering their dialogues and inserting different actions into the events unravelling 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 fully conjoin when, after their rescue of the girl from the House of Fiction, the two not only find themselves transported back to Julie's apartment, but this time it is not another "waking dream"—for the young girl, Madlyn, has joined them, safely back in 1970s Paris.
Céline, Julie and Madlyn take a rowboat on a placid river, rowing and gliding happily along. They silently observe another boat quickly passing them on the water, which is carrying the three main protagonists from the house of the alternative reality. However, Céline, Julie and Madlyn see them as the antique props they are, frozen in place.
This time, Céline is the one sitting on a park bench, nearly falling asleep when Julie rushes past her and drops her magic book in her White Rabbit way. Picking it up, Céline calls out and runs after Julie.
Cast[]
- Juliet Berto as Céline
- Dominique Labourier as Julie
- Bulle Ogier as Camille
- Marie-France Pisier as Sophie
- Barbet Schroeder as Olivier
- Nathalie Asnar as Madlyn
- Marie-Thérèse Saussure as Poupie
- Philippe Clévenot as Guilou
- Anne Zamire as Lil
- Jean Douchet as M'sieur Dédé
- Adèle Taffetas as Alice
- Monique Clément as Myrtille
- Jérôme Richard as Julien
- Michael Graham as Boris
- Jean-Marie Sénia as Cyrille