A mild-mannered librarian meets a frantic stage magician, and the two embark on a series of comic and fantastic adventures which only seem limited by the scope of their imaginations.
Jacques Rivette is a highly-influential figure of the critics-turned-directors who made up the French New Wave, and is known primarily for his experiments with narrative form and metafictional plots. Because of the length of many of his works (his epic Out 1 runs over 13 hours), as well as their unconventional nature, he has never achieved the widespread popularity of his contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.
Céline and Julie Go Boating was written in collaboration with the actresses in the film, who were free to create their own characters. Rivette and another writer implemented a subplot which adapts and fuses together two Henry James short stories and uses it to parody stilted costume dramas. Other influences include Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Marcel Proust's A Remembrance of Things Past, and the silent movie serial Les Vampires.
Here, as in other Rivette works, there are meditations on actor vs. role, storytelling vs. reality, theatre vs. film, and filmmaking vs. film viewing. Other common Rivette tropes found here involve hidden conspiracies lurking beneath a veneer of normalcy and the potential for magic in the natural world. And while Rivette is a male director, his work is widely-considered feminist in nature, and here features an environment created, hijacked, sublimated, and eventually dismantled by its female protagonists, all in the face of various corrupt male figures.
Critic David Thomson called Céline and Julie Go Boating "the most innovative film since Citizen Kane", and its influence can be seen in films as far-ranging as Desperately Seeking Susan and Mulholland Dr.
Film runs approx. 3 hrs.
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