lasttimeisaw This Jacques Rivette's genre-defying opus is an unsung hero upon its release in 1974, but 40 years later when we are all stumped in light of the cornucopia of derivative outputs, this masterpiece attests that it is never too late to burrow into historical archives, advocate some hidden gems and introduce them to the fast food generation, and CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING could overtly widen one's filmic horizon by its unprecedented storytelling and the contagious jovial aura. We are like in a blind man's bluff, the film begins with a head-scratching hide-and-seek tailing between Julie, a librarian and Celine, an amateurish magician, we will never know from the context whether they are acquaintances before or the first-sight attraction draws them closer, after a chirpy episode of putting out feelers, they lives together in a small apartment, where Celine casually mentions of her unpleasant experience working as a nanny for a mystified ménage-à-trois family, it intrigues Julie's curiosity, from then on, a very unique ghost-house yarn has been ingeniously unveiled through Celine and Julie's multiple impersonations as the reserved nanny in a boudoir drama. The film is such a pioneer in its blending liberal modus operandi of whimsicality (the first half looks like everything is done impromptu) with elaborately calculated ad hoc murder scheme, Celine and Julie's laid-back and bubbly kindred spirit permeates the film and modulates its rhythm and pulse up to a labyrinthine fantasy, utterly absorbing and an influential progenitor to many future rule-breakers (MEMENTO 1999, 10/10 for instance). It is a diptych in its cinematographic style as well, the insouciant nouvelle vague influence vs. a multi-angle observation indoors, which magnify Berto and Labourier's disparate temperaments, intensify Ogier and Pisier's distinctive mystique and functionally wrap us up into this whodunit during the long-haul. Meanwhile, Rivette adequately leaves viewers many open threads to chew on, like the jumpy inter-cutting of the shots in the house during Celine's magic show, is a perplexing maneuver to lure us into the mystery, and it works. Also, one snippet when they let a coin to decide whose turn to visit the mansion, Julie cannily says "head I win, tail you lose", one should not miss the ephemeral stimulation which plainly gives more credits than its ostensible spontaneity.At first glance, its 193 minutes running time looks daunting, but as I watched it separately in two days, it turned out pretty well. It is a film can wholly alter one's notion of story-telling in an anti-cinematic methodology, and Rivette pulls it off effortlessly, a must-see for all thirsty film gourmets plus, it has a sterling ending which will make all its time worth the wait.

MisterWhiplash It's quite an amazing experience, and I mean that in good and potentially Bad-WTF-Is-This-Anything ways. In a way it reminded me of the sci-fi short film Heaven is Now, if it were more like Inception. And in French. And it didn't have really much music at all. Matter of fact what makes the film so unique and strange and both highly entertaining/engaging and off-putting sometimes in the same scene is that it's less about is story than it is more like a documentary Rivette shot on how much these two women (Juliet Berto as Celine and Dominique Labourier as Julie) love laughing and giggling at the silly scenarios and dialog they've come up with (they were also co-writers). It's as much about watching them, how much chemistry they have together as friends and bosom buddies (so to speak) as it is about watching what they watch in their 'visions'.In short, it's about... still not totally sure exactly. The 'plot' that's to speak of (and really, who should care about that anyway, but I digress) is that these two women, Julie and Celine, meet by chance after one drops sunglasses or something and the other one follows the other to return them - all across the city. And then they strike up a friendship, based around... I suppose that they're both amiable young women who have a fancy for magic. That is, one of them is officially a magician, the other is a librarian (I think). And then... one of the women, Celine I think, goes into some strange house. Why she does go there I don't remember - perhaps thinking back now is like a dream unto itself - but when she emerges it's like she's totally drunk, stumbling around, and has a hard candy with her. When she eats it, she can see what goes on at the house, which is basically like a macabre daytime soap opera ghost-directed (so to speak) by Alfred Hitchcock.So it goes, the two women get drawn more and more into this realm of the 'house' and these people, particularly a little girl who seems subjected to the cruel, Bunuelian streaks of these rich people who roam around in a trance (maybe they have done a better job already than Tim Burton could've ever done with his Gothic 'Dark Shadows'?) and it turns kinda like into a drug movie. Or a hallucination movie. And all the while Berto and Labourier, both attractive in their own way if not gorgeous, more like naturally pretty (for Julie, and she was sweat-stains under her arm-pits, how rare/cool is that to see in a movie?), and both actresses are having a ball in this movie. That's the key for me I think; for the length that it's at, and it's pretty goddamn long, and for how obtuse things can seem (i.e. that scene at the sink where the woman's hand is bleeding and the nurse - interchangeable from shot to shot of the two leading ladies, a gag that gets funnier and weirder the longer the movie goes on), there's always a sense of play.In fact, Celine and Julie Go Boating is one of THE movies about how to 'play' in cinematic terms, and not only that but watching other people play. It turns into an Inception deal where we're the audience to the audience that is the macabre nightmare that is a home life (and with Barbet Schroeder as the husband!) There are some stretches in the film, like when Julie is by herself in the apartment looking over a picture of her ex-boyfriend, that just goes on too long, and grows into tedium. But there's no other film like it, and when Rivette and his ladies hit their stride it brought me into its arms that would sometimes combust and dance and giggle, especially in the last 40 minutes or so when Celine and Julie go together (not separate) into the house. Maybe the girls should count themselves lucky: it could've been the house out of Hausu.

FFoureyes Just saw this film again. It must have been 30 years ago (gulp!) that I saw it last but I had such fond memories I had to drive across Scotland to see it in the art house film theatre that was finally showing it again. The film quality was very suspect - it must have been the original film print (ie the one I saw 30 years ago!) or a very dodgy copy. However what a buzz to see the film again! Can't say I noticed the heavy lesbian overtones last time - must have been young and naive. The plot takes a while to settle down but once it decides it's going to be a ghost/lesbian/murder mystery/science fiction/comedy story (!!) it really gets going. As the ghosts in the house are locked in a daily loop, re-enacting the murder of the child, so we see at the end that the film is locked in a bigger loop, when Celine and Julie (finally in a boat) with the rescued girl find the ghosts have dragged them into a cycle where the whole film repeats. They thought they had rescued the girl and broken her out of the loop, only to find that there's no escape and they are all trapped in a bigger loop. But what is the meaning of the interchangeable roles? Celine pretends to be Julie and vice versa at one stage in the story. And in the re-loop of the film at the end we see that we start off with the girls swapping roles. Is it a piece of social comment? - we're all trapped in roles that we repeat every day and these roles are interchangeable, one is as trapped as any other? If life in the film is stuck going round and round forever, doomed to repeat the days of the film like some sort of broken record repeating a song (vinyl - the good old days) - is this the ultimate end of the world film?

sianc For over 30 years I have been calling this my favourite film. Like Céline and Julie I was young in 1974, there was magic in the air: dressing up with floating scarves and feather boas brought performance into everyday life, fashionable dalliance with the magic symbols beloved of the Surrealists contrasted brightly with the still fairly recent, drab post-war world. Rivette's film had more than a little of "l'air du temps". So would I be disappointed over 30 years later, seeing the film (subtitled in English) in London's National Film Theatre in May 2006? Emphatically, no. Rivette's genius is to recreate a timeless magic which weaves seamlessly through city streets and gardens and which is to be accessed in a more condensed form in the cinema (symbolised here by the rather more wooden and conventional story within the film) .This is a film for those who can sit for hours on a park bench in Paris, or at a café table, unaware of the passing of time, but entranced by the details of the surrounding architecture and the glimpsed lives of passers-by. Over three hours long, it is not a film for the person impatient for the plot to race to its conclusion, when every question is answered and every mystery solved.Magic is the magic of Paris itself. Lingering shots of cats hold our focus on the magic of the prosaic, while also reminding us of witches' familiars. Magic exists in the performance of the magician Céline. The viewer is also reconnected to the magic of childhood. We see Céline in the children's section of the library, and it is with the solemnity of small children that the two girls are happy to substitute the perfume "L'Air du Temps" (ultimately just air) for the element of air in their magic potion. The whole adventure can be seen as a return to childhood, an old photo in a toy box giving us a clue as to the origins of the mysterious house in which the girls alternately act the part of the nursemaid.It is a film with layer upon layer of allusions. The magic sweets echo the madeleines with which Proust's Marcel regained with immediacy memories of his childhood, just as they echo the magic potion in "Alice in Wonderland".Humour abounds. Try, if you understand French, to follow the word-play in the original (sometimes necessitating inaccurate translations, as when the punning pair of words "persil" (parsley)/ "esprit" are rendered as "clover"/ "clever"). Delight in the natural exuberance of the two girls as when, fearful of being discovered as one and the same nursemaid in the mysterious house, they almost literally fall about laughing as they try to disguise themselves as mirror images of themselves.Mirror images and symmetry shape the film, and are extremely satisfying to the viewer. This time round I noticed many details that I hadn't noticed before. In the penultimate scene, for example, both girls are wearing identical boating jumpers. We have to wait for the last scene for the patterns of identity to come full circle.I think this will always be my favourite film.