by Eric Blume
This week marks 50 years since the release of the Jacques Rivette classic Céline and Julie Go Boating. I’m a devoted a Francophile, but this film was a hole in my viewing, so coming to this extraordinarily strange time capsule of a movie was a bit of a challenge. C&JGB defies a lot of basic principles one expects from a movie, and by that I mean, there is no basic logic (the way these two characters initially meet, and how they behave together in their first scenes, is stylized beyond human recognition). Rivette plunges you into a purposeful state of disbelief here, wanting you to abandon your impulses for traditional narrative, character development, and behavior...
If you resist these impulses, C&JGB will be an intolerable film. I mean, literally painful, because the film runs over three hours, and the two main characters are loopy, tricky little enigmas, and their relationship is bizarre and more than a bit inaccessible. But if you accept Rivette’s world on his terms, the film has a puckish whimsy, all the more interesting when the film takes a turn around the hour mark. The remainder of the film involves the girls’ visits (via candy!) to an alternate-reality mansion, where they become involved in a family mystery, acted in a performative, “theatrical” manner that repeats itself until the protagonists begin to take control of the story. At this pivot, the film begins to have a weird, fairly compelling quality, and Rivette’s commentary on storytelling and passive/active viewing comes clearly into focus.
Still, it’s a rough ride getting to the good stuff. Rivette’s films have often explored the confluence of film and theater, and he’s not very interested in naturalism. His leads, Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier, are directed to be incredibly stilted, and while you’re always aware intellectually of the purpose behind the style, it’s hard to graft onto these lead characters, and fifty years later, watching the film feels a bit like homework.
Jacques Rivette is considered one of France’s master filmmakers, having made 29 films between 1961 and 2009. Not one of those movies was under two hours long! Rivette was not exactly known for electrifying pacing. His first movie, Paris Belongs to Us, is a classic which holds up extraordinarily well, its resonant pulse of loneliness and alienation more in line with Antonioni’s L’Aventurra (released one year earlier) than the French New Wave films at the time. It’s worth searching out on Criterion, as its reputation is well-earned.
Rivette had a decade from 1991-2001 where he directed a stretch of movies to rave reviews, beginning with La Belle Noiseuse, a four-hour film about Michel Piccoli painting a very naked Emmanuelle Beart, which was an art-house darling at the time. His two-part, six-hour telling of the Joan of Arc story, Joan the Maiden starring Sandrine Bonnaire, hit in 1995, and just a few years later another film with Bonnaire and Gregoire Colin, Secret Defense. In 2001, he had a bit of a minor crossover hit with Va Savoir, starring Jeanne Balibar. But throughout his long career, his films remained in a bit of rarified air, not really commercially successful, and always a bit impenetrable.
Have you seen Céline and Julie? What are your thoughts? Any other Rivette devotees out there?