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Céline and Julie Go Boating

Céline and Julie Go Boating (French: Céline et Julie vont en bateau) is a 1974 French comedy-fantasy film directed by Jacques Rivette, in which a magician and a librarian become entangled in a repeating melodrama inside a haunted suburban mansion. It runs 192 minutes, was produced by Barbet Schroeder for Les Films du Losange, and was co-written by Rivette with his four lead actresses and Eduardo de Gregorio.1 • 2

Key factDetail
Director / yearJacques Rivette, France, 19741
Running time192 minutes (3 h 12)1 • 2
WritingScenario by Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, and Jacques Rivette; dialogue by Eduardo de Gregorio3
Principal castJuliet Berto (Céline), Dominique Labourier (Julie), Bulle Ogier (Camille), Marie-France Pisier (Sophie), Barbet Schroeder (Olivier)3
PhotographyJacques Renard, shot on 16mm, mostly in Montmartre4
Critical standingRanked =78 in the 2022 Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time critics' poll1
LegacyRivette's biggest commercial hit; an acknowledged influence on David Lynch and Susan Seidelman5 • 6

Spoilers

Plot

Céline (Juliet Berto), a part-time magician, and Julie (Dominique Labourier), a librarian, meet in Montmartre when Céline walks out of a park dropping a scarf and then a trail of other objects, which Julie picks up as she follows. The wordless opening runs about ten minutes and is shot as a Hitchcock-style cat-and-mouse chase through the streets of Montmartre.4 The two become inseparable, sharing the same flat, bed, fiancé, clothes, identity, and imagination.5

After Céline enters an old mansion and appears to be transported to another time, working as a nanny for a family, the pair discover a strange, haunted suburban house in which a melodramatic drama repeats day after day.1 • 4 After eating a magical sweet, the two become first an audience for, and then players in, a film nested within the film that draws on Henry James: they observe its tale, enter and leave it, trade parts, and attempt to alter how it ends, a story built around a murder scheme and a young girl, Madlyn (Nathalie Asnar), whom they seek to save.5 • 7 The house episode draws on the conventions of 1940s melodrama; Marie-France Pisier recalled that she and Bulle Ogier modeled their performances on period stars, Ogier imitating Marlene Dietrich and Pisier Lillian Gish.8 Only at the very end do the two women, with the liberated Madlyn, take their boat ride.9

Production

The film grew out of the collapse of a more expensive project. Rivette and Juliet Berto had advance funding but could not raise the rest of the money, and the production fell through; Rivette then decided to make a cheaper film with a very small crew, built around Berto and her friend Dominique Labourier, whose pairing, as he put it, had a strong image.8 The starting point, Rivette said, was simply Berto and Labourier in a film to be invented among them: a comedy set in Paris in summer.8

Collaborative writing. Berto and Labourier first wrote a scenario together, a Bergman-influenced melodrama that Rivette rejected; an early version even remade Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, which Rivette refused as not a comedy. He then asked the writer Eduardo de Gregorio to join. The group worked without a full script, filling in boxes on a large sheet labeled first day, second day, third day.8 Bulle Ogier described the method: everything looks improvised but nothing is not arranged, and Rivette, after L'Amour fou, was convinced that the actor should be as much a creator as the director.8

Schedule. Filming began in early June 1973; in July the team sought locations, props, and costumes, and in August the shoot itself ran for five weeks, which Berto described as stormy, with many conflicts and crises that do not show in the finished film.8 The film surfaced at Cannes in May 1974, at 195 minutes in that version.10

Locations

Rivette shot on 16mm on the streets of Paris, mostly in Montmartre. The opening chase starts at a small park near Place Dalida off Rue Simon Dereure, passes Rue Foyatier below Sacré-Cœur and the Montmartre funicular, and later uses a walkway toward Place Dalida and a raised promenade on Rue Saint-Vincent. The mysterious mansion, given in the film as "7bis rue du Nadir aux Pommes", is in reality 7, avenue de Brétigny in Garches, west of Paris, a striped house with a turret that still stands behind walled grounds.4

Reception and influence

The film attracted a wide international audience on release and was discussed at length by Rivette in interviews and by American and British critics in Jump Cut, Film Quarterly, Film Comment, and Positif; its commercial release coincided with the crest of post-1968 feminism.11 BFI calls it Rivette's biggest commercial hit, combining theatricality, paranoia, and la vie parisienne around an examination of making and watching films.5 In the 2022 Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time critics' poll it ranked joint 78th.1 On Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 80% Tomatometer from 55 reviews and an 86% audience score.7

Influence. The BFI notes that the film has influenced everyone from David Lynch to Susan Seidelman, and cites critic Jonathan Rosenbaum's view that many women consider it their favorite film about female friendship.6 • 12 The Cinémathèque française describes it as the principal inspiration for Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan; Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice called Mulholland Drive, with its two women, a house with a secret, and transformation, its greatest descendant.3 • 13 David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, called it "the most innovative film since Citizen Kane" and "the first film in which everything is invented".14

Restorations and home video. The film has circulated in restorations on Blu-ray, including a BFI edition at its original 1.37:1 aspect ratio, and a Criterion Collection release with supplements including Claire Denis's 1994 two-part documentary Jacques Rivette: Le veilleur, a 2017 audio commentary by critic Adrian Martin, and new interviews with Bulle Ogier and Barbet Schroeder.6 • 15 In February 2024, Judith Godrèche closed her speech at the César ceremony with a quotation from the film, drawing renewed attention to Rivette's cinema.16

References

  1. Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), BFI
  2. Céline et Julie vont en bateau, Larousse, Dictionnaire mondial des films
  3. Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Jacques Rivette, 1974), La Cinémathèque française
  4. How Paris has changed since Jacques Rivette shot Céline and Julie Go Boating in 1974, BFI
  5. Watch Celine and Julie Go Boating online, BFI Player
  6. Celine and Julie Go Boating (Blu-ray), BFI Shop
  7. Celine and Julie Go Boating, Rotten Tomatoes
  8. Histoire orale de Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Jacques Rivette, 1974), La Cinémathèque française
  9. Work and play in the house of fiction (Jones, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow)
  10. Work and play in the house of fiction: Jacques Rivette's Out 1 and Céline and Julie Go Boating, Sight and Sound
  11. Theatricality and French cinema: the films of Jacques Rivette (Wiles, PhD thesis, University of Florida)
  12. Mark Kermode: 50 films every film fan should watch, BFI
  13. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) Reviews, Metacritic
  14. Céline and Julie Go Boating (12A) review, The Independent
  15. Céline and Julie Go Boating, The Criterion Collection
  16. DVD: « Va savoir + », la farandole pirandellienne de Jacques Rivette, Le Monde

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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