Céline and Julie Go Boating 1974

Looked for this video for awhile. It was in excellent condition and received it in a timely manner

French director Jacques Rivette's greatest and most famous left-bank new wave classic, Céline And Julie Go Boating is a rare treat for cinephiles. An ambitious adventure of a bored, tarot reading librarian and her new friend, a spacey stage magician- two delightfully irresistible characters. Their lives slowly become entwined as they both share a fascination with a strange old house where a classic Hollywood-style murder mystery plays out. At face value this is an extraordinary, playful comedy that engages the viewer in a world of fantasy, magic and games. Deeper, this is a remarkable, intelligent, symbolic work. Focusing on imagination, the inner child, exploration of found space (a common theme in Rivette's work), film history and innovative use of cinematic language, with a creative narrative featuring a fractured film-within-a film that deconstructs the barriers of reality and fiction. Captivating fun, but long (another Rivette trait) and filled with pop culture, film, literary references and jokes- there is so much great stuff here. This cult classic is often compared with Alice In Wonderland, the Czech new wave film Daisies, the classics Last Year In Marienbad or Persona in a comedic style, and surely inspired the David Lynch masterpiece Mulholland Dr., I would also include Malle's Black Moon and Fassbinder's World On A Wire. All these films are recommended. Criterion Collection's Blu-ray restoration is bright and colorful, especially impressive since this film was filmed on 16mm. The two disc set includes plenty of extras: an informative full length audio commentary, a feature length documentary, several interviews, and an essay booklet. Highly recommended to those willing to take a leisurely cinematic trip.

Rivette fans are by now familiar with David Thomson's comparison of this movie to CITIZEN KANE, and the reference is apt: if CITIZEN KANE is world cinema's equivalent of Newtonian physics, then CÉLINE ET JULIE VONT EN BATEAU is its string theory.The IMDb characterizes this as a film in which the actors were allowed to "go wild" with improvisation, and that is more than a little misleading. All of Rivette's scripts lean heavily on literary or theatrical sources, and in CÉLINE the only difference is that each of five contributors brought his or her own favorite books to the party. The amazing thing is that everything meshes into one of the most delightful and enigmatic films ever produced. The works of Lewis Carroll are common to all collaborators; Rivette structured the period melodrama on Henry James' novel THE OTHER HOUSE, whereas Ogier admits on disc two that she improvised very little, taking her dialogue from an unnamed second "novel" by James. (This is actually a short story, "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.") Labourier enriched the script with an apparent familiarity with Papus' writings on the Tarot, on Dreams, and on "practical magic." Perhaps most entertaining, though, is Berto's use of Blaise Cendrars, who had a Münchhausen-like tendency to embellish his many "memoirs." The comic strip adventures of BÉCASSINE are also a likely source for Berto, who would go on to write and direct other projects in her tragically brief lifetime.When this does finally get released for English-speaking audiences, I hope the subtitles are better than the wretchedly inadequate ones that exist on current film and videotape copies. There is so much hilarious wordplay in Berto's dialogue, virtually none of which was caught by the original subtitler. There are also entire sentences that went untranslated, and many of these are in the long opening act--far from being an irrelevant part of the film, it sets up and foreshadows much of what will subsequently be played out. In fact, this is a lovingly crafted film from beginning to end, and I wouldn't give up a single frame of it for all the "well-paced" films of Hollywood. Every passing year brings more prestige to this movie, and one can only hope that somebody is hard at work clearing whatever hurtles have kept it out of Region 1. It may yet turn out to be the best movie ever made.Note (2/16/09): This is now available with subtitles, from amazon.co.uk (Region 2, still), in the BFI series. Very nice print from the full-frame 16mm original, but the subtitles are still incomplete and sometimes unreliable.

NOTE: this BFI release contains Region 2 DVDs - they will only play on DVD players that can read all regions, or be reset to read region 2 disks.At 3hrs 5min in French with English subtitles, this film is not for everyone. Fans of French New Wave cinema will appreciate the uniqueness of the story, character development, and execution all on a shoestring budget. Spoiler: the 'boat' doesn't show up until 3hrs 2min into the picture - it has more to do with the French pun of 'getting caught up in a story someone is telling you'. But lovers of Shaggy Dog Stories will appreciate this, and the story within the story in the shuttered Chateau, culminating in the 'myth of Sisyphus'-like repetition where in the end the 'rock' is somehow back a the bottom of the hill, and must be rolled up-hill all over again. To me, it's like the circular story in Apocalypse Now, the 'My God, I'm still in Saigon' taken from the fact that seen in a certain light, the THAT movie is circular with Captain Willard endlessly taking his 'boat ride' up the river after Col. Kurtz. Celine & Julie 10 years later (1985) directly inspired the Madonna vehicle "Desperately Seeking Susan". A must see, but again... not for the faint of heart.

This is an old VHS and the film quality if bad -- very dark and hard to see some scenes. It is as advertised and the story is just as interesting as I remember.

This lovely movie needs to be seen a few times to really “get it”. It’s an instant retelling of “Alice In Wonderland” from the first scene where Alice follows the rabbit across the town square into the rabbit hole of dark bushes, through adventures and psychedelic misadventures, just like the first Alice in type, not film, to the end when Celine and Julie finally go boating and God’s in his heaven and all is well with the world.

Film sublime.

Eccellente

I was in my mid-twenties when I first saw this cinematic enchantment, on its initial release in the UK. It delighted me then, and still delights and enchants me now.Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier ~ who is wonderfully, mischievously funny ~ play freewheeling magician Celine and inquisitive librarian Julie, who somehow end up sharing the latter's flat. They discover a house in which odd things are happening {these sections based on various short stories by, of all people, Henry James} involving the 'Phantom Ladies Over Paris', played by Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier. Future film director Barbet Schroeder also appears as a character named Olivier.But a bare plot outline can't begin to describe the strange, comedic, hallucinatory, sometimes lyrical magic of this unique film, a highlight of Jacques Rivette's long career. I do think you need to be in the mood for it, and give yourself to its roaming, whimsical narrative, much as Celine and Julie {who do indeed 'go boating'} appear to allow seemingly arbitrary things to happen to them.One important thing to add is that the main actors, Berto & Labourier, mostly created the script themselves, from improvisations based on their own personalities.If I have a qualification to all this adulatory evangelism, it would be that the scenes in the second half of the film that take place in the imagined{?} haunted{?} house now seem rather too talky for comfort, with story ~ such as it is ~ taking too much precedence over the magical, enchanted element we've delighted in for the first hour or so.An excellent 20-page booklet comes with this two-disc DVD, including interviews with the two actresses and with Rivette, along with other notes and several photos. Disc 2 consists of an introduction to Rivette and this film by Jonathan Romney, plus two short films I'm so glad to have had the chance to see: an astonishing two-minute silent from 1901 by English film pioneer Robert W. Paul, The Haunted Curiosity Shop, and an early 20-minute film by Alain Resnais, Toute la memoire du monde, a droll documentary about, aptly, the Biblioteque Nationale. Both films are well chosen as 'desserts' to the main course.Juliet Berto sadly died aged 42 in 1990, but it's good to see that her good friend Dominique Labourier has continued as a strong presence in film and theatre in her native France.Easily one of my favourite films, French or otherwise, this three-hour magical enchantment is an unforgettable masterpiece.

("Celine und Julie vont en bateau")Ich bin überglücklich. Danke sehr dass alles so gut geklappt hat.Es war sehr schwierig, diesen Film wieder zu finden, nach allen den Jahren. Dieser Film hatte ich damals in einem kleinen Kino im Studentenviertel (Quartier Latin) in Paris entdeckt und freue mich sehr, ihn endlich wieder zu sehen. Parisienne.