by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: Jacques Rivette
CAST: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Barbet Schroeder
MY RATING: 3/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 80% Certified Fresh
PLOT: Two flighty women have a meet cute and engage in mild hijinks before stumbling into a mystery house where a story endlessly repeats itself.
Jacques Rivette’s celebrated Céline and Julie Go Boating [subtitle: “Phantom Ladies Over Paris”] is the kind of foreign film that made me swear off foreign films for several years when I was a younger man. Maddeningly elliptical, rambling, and boring, which is especially disappointing because there is an intriguing time-bending subplot that dominates the second half (or more) of the film. If the entire movie had focused on that one thread and told it more coherently, I would have been satisfied. Instead, I spent over three hours yelling over and over again at the screen: “Who cares?”
The movie opens with Julie, a bright, Phoebe-Bouffe-esque redhead reading a book about magic on a park bench. Suddenly, Céline strides by, an elvish brunette in a tank top and a green boa. She drops something (I can no longer remember what it was) and keeps walking. Julie picks it up and runs after Céline, trying to return it, but Céline is oblivious, or faking it for some reason. (Before they even leave the park, the film asserts its God-given right to be weird by adding insert shots of a cat stalking a pigeon in the park. Are we to infer something about this in relation to these two women? Hell if I know.)
Eventually, Julie catches up to Céline, invites her to stay at her place, and…and…and from there it becomes an endless series of scenes intended to be quirky and, I guess, feminist in some way, but there was no story to any of it. Céline takes a shower and spins a tall tale of a safari in Africa, while Julie impulsively rummages through Céline’s backpack and arranges the items she finds around the room. Céline visits Julie at the library where Julie works (I think?) and starts slamming large children’s books together over and over again. Why? Hell if I know.
There is a long detour so we can watch Céline at work as a magician at a sparsely attended nightclub. Best thing I can say about her act is that she rocks her costume and she’s a reasonably skilled illusionist, but it drags on foreverrrrrr. One trick after another after another, and I’m watching it going, “Who cares???” Admittedly, there is a sorta-kinda payoff to this scene later when Julie impersonates Céline at the same nightclub, but that scene drags on forever, too, plus her motives are impenetrable. UNLESS it’s to get Céline back for impersonating HER to meet Julie’s old boyfriend, in yet another scene of obscure motivations.
The intriguing Twilight-Zone-y subplot does play with time in an interesting way, showing us snippets of scenes playing out in an empty house, then replaying them with additional information each time so each successive iteration is more revealing than the last. But like so much of the rest of the film, it takes foreverrrrr to get off the ground.
It’s not that I didn’t like Céline or Julie. I had no problems with them in terms of likability. It’s just that the movie was not structured in a way that made me care about what happened to them or why. Godard’s Weekend (1967) has a similar storytelling approach, with wild edits and non-sequitur moments, so why did I respond so much more positively to that movie than to this one? I don’t know. As I sit here trying to remember plot points as I write this review, I am running out of ways to describe how apathetic I was to the characters, even when they latch on to an actual story with the “haunted” house. It just didn’t make me care. Period. And this went on for three hours…
If I simply didn’t understand the movie, so be it. There’s a lengthy essay on the film included with the Blu-ray, so maybe I’ll give that a read and maybe try to find what I missed. There’s an argument to be made against a movie that requires remedial reading, but then we start getting into 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) territory, and I don’t feel like typing much anymore.
Gene Siskel had a tongue-in-cheek litmus test: “Is this movie better than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?” Céline and Julie Go Boating incriminates itself by including a five- or ten-minute scene of Céline having lunch with some of her friends in which all of the dialogue was improvised, and that scene is one of the better scenes in the movie. Talk about having your cake and eating it, too.
