Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)
Directed by Jacques Rivette
Julie, a daydreaming librarian, meets Céline, an enigmatic magician, and together they become the heroines of a time-warping adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder-mystery melodrama.
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What critics compared Céline and Julie Go Boating to
Writer/director Peter Strickland's ("Berberian Sound Studio") latest begins with a bit of an ick factor as his opening lesbian S&M scenario ends with a behind-closed-door 'punishment' that sounds dreadful, but trust in this auteur as "The Duke of Burgundy" (a type of butterfly) blossoms into a louche hothouse Gothic that plays like Dario Argento's "Celine and Julie Go Boating" or Peter Greenaway's "Angels and Insects."
That’s largely a credit to the performances of D’Anna and Knudsen, who play things straight (so to speak), and who communicate volumes about their characters through the subtlest variations on their endlessly repeated scene — a structure that gives the movie a glancing connection with Jacques Rivette’s classic “Celine and Julie Go Boating.”
The extent to which he pushes the warehouse scenario goes beyond the work of legendary directors like Jacques Rivette on the ‘film within a film’ (CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING) and takes the audience on a journey that is more than a formalist foray into the meaning of film (or indeed theatre) production for its paricipants.
But at its best there are hints that Wright and excellent co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns have dutifully studied Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating .
Tell me that characters are travelling magically back through time (as in Celine and Julie Go Boating ) or being possessed by another personality ( The Tenant ) or undergoing a prolonged psychotic episode ( Repulsion ) and I’ll happily believe you.
Inspired to investigate for himself, Jake travels from sunny Florida to foggy Wales, pokes around the rundown mansion where gramps claims to have once lived, and then stumbles backward in time into an eternally repeating day, like the title characters of Jacques Rivette’s Céline And Julie Go Boating.
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A major influence on Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating, this 1966 feature is chock-full of female giggling, which might be interpreted in context as the laughter of Medusa: subversive, bracing, energizing, and rather challenging to most male spectators.
Not to mention his most complicated and beautiful film to date, Celine and Julie Go Boating, which is the closest Rivette ever came to getting inside cinema itself.
I became a fan of director Jacques Rivette in 1992 after seeing his four-hour La Belle Noiseuse on the big screen.