#78 (tie): Céline and Julie Go Boating: The Reveal discusses all 100 of Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time

Jacques Rivette goes down the rabbit hole in this delightfully improvised experiment about two women who find themselves interacting with another narrative.

On December 1st, 2022, Sight & Sound magazine published “The Greatest Films of All Time,” a poll that’s been updated every 10 years since Bicycle Thieves topped the list in 1952. It is the closest thing movies have to a canon, with each edition reflecting the evolving taste of critics and changes in the culture at large. It’s also a nice checklist of essential cinema. Over the course of many weeks, months, and (likely) years, we’re running through the ranked list in reverse order and digging into the films as deep as we can. We hope you will take this journey with us.

Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)
Dir. Jacques Rivette 
Ranking: #78 (tie)
Previous rankings: #139 (2012), #95 (2002). 

Premise: A librarian named Julie (Dominique Labourier) is sitting on a park bench reading a book about magic when Céline (Juliet Berto) zips by, dropping various possessions. Julie follows this elusive stranger down the proverbial rabbit hole that eventually leads to Céline moving into her apartment. The two go on various adventures, often swapping identities, but the narrative eventually takes them to a large ivy-covered house hidden away at 7 bis, rue du Nadir-aux-Pommes. Within this space—which they enter mysteriously and get jettisoned from eventually—Céline and Julie get exposed to a narrative that we only see in bits and pieces, often by one (or both) of them sucking on a piece of Proustian candy. In this story-within-a-story, there’s tension between two sisters, Camille (Bulle Ogier) and Sophie (Marie-France Pisier), over a widower named Olivier (Barbet Schroeder), whose young daughter Madlyn meets a tragic fate. As the film unfolds, Céline and Julie not only start to piece the narrative together, but discover that they can have an impact on its outcome. 

Scott: Keith, I believe this is a first viewing of Céline and Julie Go Boating for both of us, crossing off a big missing title on the cinema essentials list. To get this conversation off to an appropriately digressive start, the experience reminded me of my one contribution to Better Late Than Never, an old A.V. Club feature where writers caught up on a canonical work they’d somehow missed before. My choice was Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude—the piece is still up on the site, but without the name of the feature, which will make it confusing to readers (the G/O Media touch!)—and my basic takeaway was, “Well, that just accounted for half the American independent films I’ve seen in the last 20 years or so.” I wouldn’t say the effect of Céline and Julie on me was quite so far-reaching, but suffice to say, “How did David Lynch have to nerve to believe he could pull off the narrative shapeshifting of Mulholland Dr.?” is no longer a rhetorical question. 

I arrive at Céline and Julie in sort of a backwards way. Like many lusty college-age cinephile men in the early ‘90s with an interest in Emmanuelle Béart, I bee-lined to the two-tape, four–hour La Belle Noiseuse and found myself mesmerized by more than the copious nudity. It was an early lesson in the merits of what is now commonly called “slow cinema,” which in the hands of a master like Rivette can readjust your metabolism and allow you to sink into the scratch-scratch-scratch meticulousness of an artist at work. During the fruitful last decade or so of his career, I was the resident A.V. Club Rivette critic, covering 1994’s Joan the Maid, 1998’s Secret Defense, and 2001’s widely celebrated Va Savoir. Though it’s not quite like getting into Neil Young by listening only to his ‘80s records—these were all very good films, for one—I had never had the opportunity to climb the 13-hour mountain of 1971’s Out 1 and this was my first go-around with Céline and Julie (which, in my defense, wasn’t always the easiest film to access). 

Though my experience with Rivette did leave me mostly prepared for Céline and Julie’s narrative gamesmanship, it was both more challenging than I expected and ultimately more playful and fun. While you can see those Mulholland Dr. connections in the Mobius strip structure and the relationship between these two women—which obviously, gets kicks up a notch or two sexually—the David Lynch film doesn’t start to break into pieces until the second half, when a straightforward-by-Lynch-standards Hollywood noir twists into something darker and more puzzling. Céline and Julie, by contrast, throws us in the deep end and we paddle around until the internal logic sorts itself out—much as it does for the two title characters themselves, as they get their bearings in the story-within-a-story unfolding at 7 bis, rue du Nadir-aux-Pommes. 

But this is a film that has you at “hello.” I don’t know if Céline and Julie gets any better than the opening sequence where the two meet in a park and Julie starts chasing down Céline like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. The absurdity of the chase primes you for Rivette’s eagerness to break and re-write the rules, and there’s something so infectious about Julie’s enthusiasm in continuing after her, especially when Céline boards the Funiculaire de Montmartre and Julie dashes up the famed stairs after her. (There’s a cool piece here about how Paris has changed since the Rivette film.) As they continue to encounter each other in the early part of the film, we’re then primed to accept the odd ways in which the relationship is established, like a scene later in Julie’s library where Céline loudly marks up a children’s storybook while Julie dips her fingers in red stamp ink. Rivette is setting his own context. 

I don’t want to bring my part of the discussion all the way up to the mysterious house and the story that unfolds within it, but I appreciated how much Rivette fiddles with small reversals of identity before we get there. After Céline moves into Julie’s place—a move that just sort of happens, christened by a Bloody Mary that Julie makes before Céline even asks for it—I loved the sequence where Céline takes a call from Julie’s boyfriend Guilou, meets him at a park gazebo as Julie (she wears a wig), and he accepts the premise. They dance. They get engaged. They break up. Céline-as-Julie tells him to “jack off among the roses” and that’s the end of it, at least until the actual Julie gets an angry call from him later and laughs it off, even though she has no idea what he’s talking about. 

So how’d you do, Keith? Did it take you a while to find your way through this film? Was there a point where it clicked for you? It immediately struck me as a film that’d be a breeze to take in on a second viewing, when you’ve learned how to watch it. But there is a certain amount of pleasure in puzzling this one out, too.

Keith: This is my first Rivette and, despite reading descriptions of the film, I didn’t know quite what to expect. It’s a puzzling film but, as you suggest, one that teaches you how to watch it as it goes along. But I think it’s another quality that carries viewers along: It’s really fun. I’m sure it wasn’t easy to make, but the film has such a light touch and Céline and Julie are such joyous characters that it’s hard not to want to follow them wherever they go, however confusing. I found myself confused, but quite pleasantly. 

Céline and Julie is a long movie, but it doesn’t feel long in part because it’s not trying to move to the rhythms movies usually follow. Yet there’s a structure to it that’s evident even on a first viewing that would undoubtedly become clearer with closer study. Céline and Julie each impersonate each other once, for instance, at opposite ends of the movie. A logic of how their visits to the house work reveals itself over the course of several scenes. Like some of Lynch’s films—and I had not made that connection—it only seems like it’s ruled by chance. When it came full circle at the end, I found myself nodding and thinking it could end no other way.

It’s still kind of baffling though, isn’t it? It’s the sort of film that defies you to say what it’s “about.” Instead, I found myself thinking about some of the context around it. Where the events of 1968 seemed to have hardened the politics of other filmmakers, like Godard, Céline and Julie in some ways plays like an optimistic counterpoint, seeing tremendous, and hopeful, possibilities in the upsetting of the old order. Julie, like others to emerge from the ‘60s counterculture, has turned to a newly resurgent interest in the occult to make sense of the world. (She seems to inadvertently summon Céline while casually exploring magic on a park bench.) Maybe there’s a deeper, more mysterious world to be found beneath the surface of the everyday world of corner shops, cluttered libraries, and cramped flats. (Though I’ve romanticized this era to the point that the idea of walking around ’70s Paris feels transporting enough!)

Once the “plot” kicked in, I found the efforts of our heroines to rescue Madlyn from her fate quite moving. At its core, the film is about (sorry to use that word after dismissing it) two young women of a generation just coming into its own who try to change a seemingly unalterable narrative. Madlyn’s story is a tragedy playing out in the trappings of an older, ruling class Europe. The story itself is original but it’s of a familiar, melodramatic type: jealous people with money destroying each other while an innocent pays the price. What if a pair of high-spirited giggling women wrested that sort of story away from fate and, in the process, confined it to the past? Maybe the future can be rewritten.

Let me throw this back to you with a question I don’t necessarily have answers for myself: What’s your take on Céline and Julie? They become increasingly interchangeable over the course of the film, almost as if their personalities meld, but they begin at different spots. Céline’s a magician who runs with entertainers (though, at first, I thought she might be from a literally magical realm herself). Julie’s a bit of a dreamer who’d be content to find adventure in books and on the verge of settling down with a childhood crush. Do these differences matter? How do you see them playing out in the film?

Scott: To be honest, I’m happy you’re asking me these questions because I never really asked them of myself. I was so caught up in Céline and Julie as meta-narrative that I never thought much about the narrative, especially since the story-within-the-story in the house is so stylized and artificial, like something Todd Haynes would try later. (Haynes is another contemporary director who seems very familiar with this work.) But I like your thoughts about the generational significance of our two title characters and their intervention in the lives of people who represent an older, ruling-class Europe. I think I’m a bit less convinced of the latter part, because it struck me a little like the movie-within-a-movie in Sherlock Jr., this malleable stock production that the “real” characters can enter and manipulate. 

But thinking more about Céline and Julie themselves, we have to start from the beginning, with Julie as the bookish type in search of adventure—she reads about magic, but has little of it in her life—and Céline as the White Rabbit whose spontaneity (and maybe a little something else) thrills her. One of the joys of this movie is how much fun each woman has in living out scenes of the other’s life, divorced from any consequences that might come of it. Céline meets Julie’s boyfriend in the park and winds up playing him like a yo-yo, seducing him into a dance and a ring before taking a wrecking ball to the relationship. Later, Julie accepts the call for Céline’s big international audition, confident that she’s memorized all the magic tricks and sexy stagecraft, but she improvises something completely different in front of Céline’s baffled, cigar-puffing benefactors. Making the film involved a ton of improvisation, and while it doesn’t pay off perfectly—I could have done without all that business with Céline embellishing an American friend who has a heart-shaped pool—it’s baked into Rivette’s entire conceit. Anything can happen. 

But once we get into the second half of the film and more of the action focuses on Céline and Julie’s involvement with the drama in the house, they seem to merge—part co-conspirators, part representatives of the audience. They have their broken-up pieces of candy and off they go, sucking on the candy to get into the house and chatting side-by-side about all the drama they’ve witnessed. The way they’re framed at times make them unmistakable stand-ins for movie-theater companions, the sort who might whisper to each other about what they’re seeing on screen. At those moments, you start to feel like there’s not much distance between the two characters, which I suppose is part of the identity-swapping that prepares you for reversal at the end of the film. 

Because of the improvisational nature of Rivette’s work—and of Céline and Julie specifically, which has that seat-of-the-pants spontaneity to it—I think there’s ultimately a lot of flexibility in terms of how we think about these characters, who are more like pieces in a grander design. The deeper you get into the film, the more self-aware you become: This is a film about watching, about narrative, about our engagement with a story and the fantasies that we can project onto it. Part of the fun of Céline and Julie is that a film—or a piece of literature, for that matter—doesn’t allow us to affect how it transpires, so we can engage in the fantasy of rearranging events as the characters do here. 

Céline and Julie (and Madlyn) do eventually go boating, and I’m curious to hear what you make of that sequence, Keith. And what do you think of the ending in general?  Also, can you see the imprint of the film on other filmmakers besides David Lynch? The other name that came to mind for me was Hong Sang-soo, who loves to pull off structural experiments and seems to allow for the same loosey-goosey flexibility in how characters relate to each other. 

Keith: To answer your last question first, I turned to Google and found an obit on RogerEbert.com written by our friend Patrick McGavin that lists Scorsese, Susan Seidelman, Jim Jarmusch, and Richard Linklater (Céline : Julie :: Céline : Jessie) as directors who’ve cited Rivette as an influence. I don’t have an easy time making connections with all of those but, as I mentioned above, I can only speak for Céline and Julie Go Boating and the place I can most easily see his influence is in the work of Abbas Kiarostami. Both use quite humble methods to bend the nature of reality itself. For instance, at a certain point it starts to feel like Céline and Julie have always been friends, just as “She” and James suddenly have a long, complicated relationship in Certified Copy. 

As for the ending, I found myself moved by it for reasons that were hard to articulate. Some of it was just appreciating that the title had a payoff and the boldness of placing it where Rivette did. But I also found neither of our protagonists have been shy about expressing mirth throughout the film, but they’d also been through a lot. Here, at last, was the reward promised from the start. (It’s worth noting that they’re both wearing the same top.) But the way the film goes silent when our melodrama protagonists show up is unsettling, as if all that struggle might have been for nothing. Even the cat looks spooked. Then we see Céline on the bench and it begins again. It feels kind of perfect, but perfect in a way that’s hard to explain.

As for your comments about this being a film about watching, it’s a bit easy to forget that Rivette emerged from the French New Wave, since his best known films come after the wave’s first crest. But he was in the thick of it, assisting Rohmer and Truffaut on their early shorts and his own short, “Le Coup du berger” was cited as an influence by Claude Chabrol and others. But maybe most relevant to Céline and Julie, he was a critic and remained a devoted cinephile after beginning his own filmmaking career. In a Film Comment profile from 1974, Jonathan Rosenbaum noted, “For whatever it’s worth, I’ve seen him more often at Cinémathèque screenings over the past five years than all other local directors I know combined.” He also wrote of Rivette’s enthusiasm for Robert Altman, another director whose work feels akin to his thanks to the way it weaves in and out of cinematic expectations. In the interview portion of that article, Rivette goes into tremendous detail about the cinematic sources the film’s incorporating into its pastiche via quotes like, “I thought during the shooting that the film was a little bit like an RKO movie of the ’50s, but in color—those films that more or less successfully imitated Wyler’s. There was a fad between 1945 and 1950 to use mise en scène in depth, particularly at RKO—the Gregg Toland influence. “

While we’re looking at that article, I like this quote:

“Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice. And the movie has much of the crazy logic we associate with Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece. In order to make sense out of its partially improvised narrative, the spectator, too, must be prepared to improvise, to constantly renew his expectations, never able to settle down in his seat with the comfortable idea that this is, once and for all, a comedy, a mystery, or even a fantasy. The events of this film do not simply proceed from left to right, as it were, in front of his eyes; each act generates that which follows it—as, in Alice, when she cries, her tears form a pool, the animals race to get dry, etc.—so that the narrative “procession” appears rather to advance at a right angle to the spectator, forcing him to chase after it.”

Here’s another question that comes to mind reading that article: How do we square this film with the New Wave’s beloved auteur theory? Rivette gives himself the credit of “Mise en Scene” beneath a writing credit that includes both stars, Eduardo de Gregorio, Bulle Ogier, and Marie-France Pisier. Speaking to Rosenbaum, he attributes much of the characters’ creation to “the girls.” He mentions writing the principal scenes with Pisier, Ogier, and Gregorio and notes there were “many precise things that had to be said” for the film to work. But it seems like everything around it was improvised, which opens up a whole school of comedy that might have been influenced by this film, too, doesn’t it? Also, as this article reaches its own “go boating” scene as we near the end, do you have any favorite moments?

Scott: With regard to the auteur theory, Rivette spreading the credit around doesn’t complicate the theory but validate it. I think there’s a perception that a true auteur has firm control over every aspect of production, but the whole impetus of the theory was that French critics were looking at the Hollywood film industry and recognizing certain traits that distinguished directors no matter who was working alongside them. It doesn’t surprise me to hear that Rivette loved Altman so much given their mutual affinity for improvisation and the latitude they like to extend to their actors. The other Altman-esque quality to Céline and Julie that I love is Rivette’s attention to the details of location, which is how you get a piece like the one I linked to earlier in our discussion about how the various spots in Paris have changed since 1974. One of the great pleasures of seeing movies that are shot on location by directors of this caliber—or even by hacks sometimes—is that they can feel like stepping into a time machine and experiencing how people lived at a very specific moment. Those are the context clues that allow us to speculate about the differences between the two title characters when the film unfolds. 

I don’t know what to make of the boating scene, other than to pick up what you said about Kiarostami possibly being influenced by Rivette. You think about the famous ending to Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry: You have this intense drama about a suicidal cab driver seeking a passenger willing to bury him after he dies, but suddenly Kiarostami pulls back and reveals the artifice of the filmmaking process. (I had a cinema studies teacher who liked to call that “laying the device bare.”) Rivette lays the device bare much earlier, but having the three adults from the house reappear in the boating scene with our two heroines plus Madlyn (and the cat) reunites all the principal characters of this narrative experiment Rivette and his cast have been spinning. It feels like a kind of bow, though I’m not sure what to make of the formal poses and vaguely hostile expressions of the house adults as they float on by. 

As for favorite moments, you hate to say the movie peaks early, but the opening sequence is such a delight, especially as it continues to unfold over a long period of time and in multiple locations, to the point of giddy absurdity. (You asked for moments, though, so let’s just say Julie dashing up the Montmartre stairs after Céline’s tram.) I also loved the scene where Julie gets a call from her boyfriend after Céline had taken her place and torpedoed the relationship, because Julie doesn’t act confused or upset by the huffy things he has to say about it. She may not know what he’s talking about, but she also doesn’t care. She ends the call with an insult (“Go masturbate among the daisies”) that echoes what Céline had said to him at the park. 

What about you, Keith? What are your favorites? And which of the many films tied at #78 are we going to tackle next? 

Keith: I was heartened reading that cool BFI piece to see how intact the locations looked. Also, did the last John Wick movie blow it by not staging a funicular fight? As for favorite moments, I love Julie’s attempt to perform Céline’s magic act, though it made me a little nervous. What about her career?!? But I think by that point they’ve passed such concerns, just as Julie’s childhood crush doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe nothing they thought mattered is that big a deal. Beatrice Layoza has a good line in her essay on the film for Criterion when she notes it “wields laughter—women’s laughter—like a weapon for shattering conventions.”

As for what’s next, some of the films tied at #78 are quite long. Some rather short. We’ve been alternating them so…:

Next: Modern Times

#95 (tie): Get Out 
#95 (tie): The General 
#95 (tie): Black Girl
#95 (tie): Tropical Malady
#95 (tie): Once Upon a Time in the West
#95 (tie): A Man Escaped
#90 (tie): Yi Yi
#90 (tie): Ugetsu
#90 (tie): The Earrings of Madame De… 
#90 (tie): Parasite
#90 (tie): The Leopard
#88 (tie): The Shining
#88 (tie): Chungking Express
#85 (tie): Pierrot le Fou
#85 (tie): Blue Velvet
#85 (tie): The Spirit of the Beehive
#78 (tie): Histoire(s) du Cinéma
#78 (tie): A Matter of Life and Death