Céline and Julie Go Boating
Céline (Juliet Berto), a magician, and Julie (Dominique Labourier), a librarian, meet in Montmartre and end up sharing the same flat, bed, fiancé, clothes, identity and imagination. Soon, thanks to a magic sweet, they find themselves spectators, then participants, in a Henry James-inspired film-within-the film - a melodrama unfolding in a mysterious suburban house with the 'Phantom Ladies Over Paris' (Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier), a sinister man (Barbet Shroeder) and his child.
Céline and Julie Go Boating, Rivette's rarely seen yet biggest commercial hit, is an exhilarating combination of the themes of theatricality, paranoia and la vie parisienne, all wrapped up in an extended and entrancing examination of the nature of film-making (and film-watching).
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Supplements
- New filmed introduction by Jonathan Romney on Rivette and Céline and Julie Go Boating, with optional hard-of-hearing subtitles
- Toute la mémoire du monde (Alain Resnais, 1956, 20 mins, English subtitles)
- The Haunted Curiosity Shop (R W Paul, 1901, 2 mins, silent)
- Fully illustrated booklet with essay by Tom Milne; interviews with Dominique Labourier, Juliet Berto and Jacques Rivette; Susan Seidelman's reflections on her Rivette-inspired Desperately Seeking Susan, and Rivette biography by Jason Wood