Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)

★ 6.8 3h 13m IMDb

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.

Céline and Julie Go Boating

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Cast

Juliet Berto
Juliet Berto as Céline Died 1990 · Grenoble, Isère, Rhône-Alpes, France From Wikipedia Juliet Berto (January 16, 1947 – January 10, 1990) was a French actress, director and screenwriter. A member of the same loose group of student radicals as Anne Wiazemsky, she first a...
Dominique Labourier
Dominique Labourier as Julie Age 82 · Reims, Marne, France Dominique Labourier (born 29 April 1943) is a French actress. Born in Reims, France, she is best known outside France for starring as Julie in Jacques Rivette's film Celine and Julie Go Boating (Célin...
Bulle Ogier
Bulle Ogier as Camille Age 86 · Boulogne-Billancourt, Seine [now Hauts-de-Seine], France Bulle Ogier (born Marie-France Thielland on 9 August 1939) is a French actress. Ogier's first appearance on screen was in Voilà l'Ordre, a short film directed by Jacques Baratier with a number of the...
Marie-France Pisier
Marie-France Pisier as Sophie Died 2011 · Dalat, French Indochina Marie-France Pisier (10 May 1944 – 24 April 2011) was a French actress, screenwriter, and director. She appeared in numerous films of the French New Wave, and twice earned the national César Award for...
Barbet Schroeder
Barbet Schroeder as Olivier Age 84 · Tehran, Iran Barbet Schroeder (born 26 August 1941) is an Iranian-born Swiss film director and producer who started his career in French cinema in the 1960s, working with directors of the French New Wave such as J...
Philippe Clévenot
Philippe Clévenot as Guilou Died 2001 · Paris, France Philippe Clévenot compte parmi les plus grands acteurs d’une génération qui, dans les années 1960-1970, se lançait dans l’aventure des créations collectives et entendait toucher un nouveau public, pop...

Audience Reviews

badelf 9/10 Aug 15, 2025
**The Orphan Love Child of Harry Houdini and Timothy Leary**

_Céline and Julie Go Boating_ is two children who’ve stolen the keys to the dream factory, turning the machinery on and pressing all the button at once just to see what happens. This film is pure magic. But it's not the kind that arrives with fanfare and spotlights. Rivette has crafted a quiet, subversive magic of women who’ve decided the rules don’t apply to them. Rivette’s film isn’t so much watched as it is inhabited. At three hours, it's not long - it's damned intoxicating. This is a place where a house becomes a haunted television set broadcasting the same melodrama on loop until someone dares to change the channel.

Contrary to popular belief, Céline and Julie isn’t French New Wave. This is something wilder, more unruly. It's a cousin to the New Bohemian Front, that loose confederation of artists who, after the Vietnam War, treated life and art as the same chaotic experiment. Here, you can feel the kinship with Ginsberg’s The Fall of America, where poetry becomes a live wire of revelation, or Springsteen’s Nebraska, where stories are stripped to their bones and left to bleed. And like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising or Patti Smith’s Horses, it’s a work that refuses to behave, that understands art as a kind of sacred mischief. Rivette’s Paris isn’t a set, but a playground, and Céline and Julie aren’t characters so much as they are sisters, rewriting their world with the giddy audacity of kids who’ve realized no one’s watching.

What makes it fascinating, technical flaws and all, is the alchemy between Berto and Labourier. They move through the film like a pair of tricksters, their energy infectious, their connection immediate and unforced. There’s a scene where they swap identities, trying on each other’s lives like dresses in a thrift store, and it’s so effortless you believe they’ve been doing this forever. They’re not acting, they’re playing; and the film becomes a testament to the power of that playfulness. This is pure Rivette style - cinema as an eyeball on improvisation.

Unlike most films, the feminist theme isn’t didactic, it’s organic. It's a natural extension of the leads' dynamic. Just like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, two forerunners of the New Bohemian Front, they’re a duo who’ve built their own world, one where men are irrelevant, and magic is real.

I love the film’s surrealism because it isn’t the cold, cerebral kind. It’s warm, tactile, the kind that makes you believe, just for a moment, that if you concentrate hard enough, you could step through a mirror into Wonderland. The house where the melodrama unfolds is a perfect metaphor for the stories we inherit and the personal power we have to rewrite them. Céline and Julie don’t just watch - they intervene, they laugh, they turn tragedy into farce. It’s a reminder that the best kind of art doesn’t just reflect life; it creates possibilities.

In the end, Céline and Julie Go Boating isn’t about escape. It’s about possession, it's about taking the reins of your own story no matter how strange or messy it gets. It’s a film that doesn’t just break the rules; it makes you realize the rules don't exist.

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