‘Céline and Julie Go Boating’ Floats by on Whimsy, Charm, and Movie Magic

It may be a cliché, but good filmmaking really does feel like magic, with an atmospheric image and an effective edit akin to a magician’s sleight of hand. Playing at the IFC Center starting Friday, the 1974 cult French film “Céline and Julie Go Boating” makes the “magic of moviemaking” plain when, about an hour in, Céline performs a magic show while Julie watches and begins to experience quick flashbacks to a mysterious house she had just visited. Hecklers jeer at the cheap tricks, yet director Jacques Rivette implies that even the simplest of optical illusions can prompt remembrances and creativity — provided one is in a receptive state of mind.Watching the movie with an open and patient mind is essential to enjoying the many loopy pleasures, and the occasional longueur, during its three-and-a-quarter-hour runtime. An influence on movies such as David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” and Susan Seidelman’s “Desperately Seeking Susan,” the film’s narrative involves two young women who meet and begin to trade stories about their visits to a house in which something both humorously and darkly funny is occurring. Its story and style alternates languorous talky scenes with lightning-fast editing, character-based perspectives with tropes from theater and silent movies, and improvisation with plotting. In doing so, the film becomes a visionary take on modernity, experimentation, defying convention, and the feminine imagination.The first hour of “Céline and Julie Go Boating” sets the shambolic stage for what will be inverted in its driven third, from an elastic mise-en-scène to a boxier one. The movie opens with redhead Julie (Dominique Labourier) reading a book on magic in a park. After a long take of her attempting to conjure something into existence, brunette Céline (Juliet Berto) walks by and drops her sunglasses, which Julie promptly picks up and tries to return. Although Céline is aware she is being followed for several kilometers up and down Parisian streets, the two never officially meet. The next day, after another session of reading and conjuring in the park after work, Julie encounters Céline at the door of her apartment. With nowhere to live, Céline becomes Julie’s roommate, relaying how earlier that day, she experienced an unpleasant encounter with one of her employers. She claims she’s a nanny, but Julie susses out that she’s a fabulist. Despite this, the two share a sensibility, and a strange friendship develops.In this first hour, scenes of them at their jobs — Julie is a librarian and Céline a magician — are interspersed with moments of them outdoors at a Paris that looks more like a charming small town than the city viewers usually see in movies. Indeed, when Julie visits the address of Céline’s “employers,” which just happens to be a place she remembers from her youth, the ivy-covered maison seems like something out of a fairy tale. Coincidentally, direct and oblique references to “Alice in Wonderland,” “Pygmalion,” “In Search of Lost Time,” and the gothic tales of Henry James contribute to the film’s time-shifting, identity-swapping, gonzo spirit. Cats, dolls, and fervent color also add to its sense of playfulness.The titular characters share an impishness that reaches a high point in the first hour when a wigged Céline goes to meet Julie’s childhood boyfriend Guilou, now an adult. On a park bandstand, Céline and Guilou enact a hilarious pantomime of romantic, suggestive, and finally risqué banter while children and their parents look on. The erotic element is an ever-present force, as when, in the aforementioned magic show, Céline shows a toned thigh as she’s perched on a piano, or each time the women leave the mysterious house, they remove pieces of psychotropic candy from their mouths.A second magic show during the movie’s second hour acts as a counterpoint to this eroticism. Julie, subbing in for her friend and performing a clumsy song-and-dance routine, confronts the male backers of the show, accusing them of being perverts and voyeurs. Whether director Rivette is pointing a finger at himself, at viewers’ expectations, or both is unclear, but what is apparent is that men do not figure highly in the real or imaginary lives of Céline and Julie. Once the pair realize a murder will be committed in the house they keep visiting/invoking, the film’s focus shifts. With each peek we get of the goings-on in the abode, the more it seems we’re watching a satirical Buñuel film in miniature, complete with droll humor and surreal touches, like the fact that one of its inhabitants, played by Marie-France Pisier, faints at the sight of flowers. The great actress Bulle Ogier appears, gorgeous as ever, as does acclaimed director Barbet Schroeder as the man of the house.The contrast between the impromptu quality of the present-day scenes with the period melodrama moments within the house comes to a head when Céline and Julie decide to prevent the death they have foreseen. No longer just “seeing” what is transpiring and mocking it out loud like they were watching television, the pair, after cooking up a heady witch’s brew, take active roles in the hoary drama and deny it a violent climax. What began as a lark ends with a resonant message and a gentle yet undeniable power.

‘Céline and Julie Go Boating’ Floats by on Whimsy, Charm, and Movie Magic

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