Fact
Reviews

Celine and Julie Go Boating

Michael Hayward

Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film Celine and Julie Go Boating (British Film Institute DVD) is set in a Paris that is half Wonderland, half real, a Paris in which events unfold according to the same dream-like logic that astonished Alice, and that entrances readers of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. A young woman—Julie—sits on a Paris park bench in the dog days of summer, absorbed in a book on magic, tracing runes in the dirt with her heel. Another woman—dishevelled, draped in a feather boa and trailing scarves—drops a pair of glasses as she rushes past, and Julie sets off in hot pursuit, like Alice after the white rabbit. And so the mystery begins. Odd events take place inside a long-abandoned house as two elegant women, dressed in fashions from another time, compete for the affections of a sombre widower whose young daughter—a pawn in the proceedings—appears to be in mortal danger. Somehow Celine (a magician) and Julie (a librarian) are entangled in the goings-on—we’re not quite sure how—and fragments of this story-within-a-story play out in a kind of loop. Celine and Julie Go Boating is a magical film (if somewhat slow to start), playful and yet thought-provoking too. In some sense it was the Paris of Celine and Julie that I’d hoped to find during my first trip to France: mysterious, with wonders tucked away on back streets and in half-deserted squares. This is the film’s first DVD appearance for English-language fans (optional subtitles, some extras). Available from bfi.org.uk—but note that it requires a Region 2 player.

Tags
No items found.

SUGGESTIONS FOR YOU

Reviews
Michael Hayward

Wanda x 3

Review of "Wanda" written and directed by Barbara Loden, "Suite for Barbara Loden" by Nathalie Léger, translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon and "Wanda" by Barbara Lambert.

Dispatches
CB Campbell

Joe and Me

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

Reviews
Michael Hayward

Sitting Ducks

Review of "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands" by Kate Beaton.