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Dir. Jacques Rivette
It shows how complex one's tastes
can be when a lot of my film viewing involves trangressive films, very violent
and confrontational films, films likely to shock or cause strong divisive
reactions, that one of the few films I've seen multiple times is
Celine and Julie Go Boating. This is as
far as you can get from those films. It's still a film that challenges, but not
in brutality, instead through stretching the medium itself into new directions
in the form of an amusing frolic. The fact it's a frolic furthers its goal of
going into new directions. In three and
a touch hours of concentrated whimsical magic realism, red haired librarian
Julie (
Dominique Labourier) meets
performing magician Celine (
Juliet Berto)
by accident, bond and bond further over a mysterious house where a
self-perpetuating story takes place involving two women (
Bulle Ogier and
Marie-France
Pisier) vying for a widow (film director
Barbet Schroeder) while his ill daughter (
Nathalie Asnar) is caught in-between, one which continues to repeat
on and on the more times Celine and Julie witness it or enter the house. Its
evokes
Věra Chytilová's Daisies (1966) instantaneously only not
as a psychedelic and pyrotechnic rush of visuals, but an elaborate film which
mixes cinema vérité with fantasy in a quieter tone, which has an innocence on
one hand but on the other reflects that the protagonists are adult women. These
women are charming and absurd, but they will gladly castrate any male mentally
that tries to antagonise them. The film is as diverse; blood is split in the
melodrama and a serious plot takes place even if Celine and Julie mock the
theatrics occasionally.
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What the film does differently is
emphasise itself as a comedic and light hearted work, which plays everything
that takes place as an adventure or of intrigue. Where suddenly a Les vampires (1915) tribute raids a
library and involves roller skates. It's a film that involves two exceptionally
strong female protagonists when I'm usually watching very male centric films,
which is worth reminding myself of in how potentially patronising my thoughts
can be, in an accidental retroactive way, when I worry about not viewing enough
films that show strong female influences but neglect films I love like this one
or Daisies. Women like those in Daisies are in the centre of this film,
who can be eccentric, very childish but always in control, possessing a manic
energy through Labourier and Berto's performances that is emphasised
by the fact that with director Jacques
Rivette they had direct involvement in creating the film's story as they
did the characters, the result promoting two protagonists who don't shrivel up
in any encounter with any patriarchal interaction and trundle through their
adventure with abandon and the grace of two mischief makers. As a fully
collaborated project between the main actresses and the director/co-writer, the
result is both freewheeling and improvised, as if the narrative is still being
built before it gets to the next scene, but carefully put together in production
to not because pointlessly random. The film's imposing three hour length
actually tricks your senses upon actually watching it. Three hours is a lengthy
viewing experience even for ravenous cinephiles. Three hours, unless you go
into the territory of super long films including a few Rivette works, still have the magnetism to them of being immense
viewing experiences; barring Michael Bay films and attempts by blockbusters to
undermine their status, they usually evoke historical epics, and mean
encompassing and elaborate narratives.
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From https://magnoliaforever.files.wordpress.com/
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An hour suddenly passes by in Celina and Julie Go Boating without me
realising it because I was distracted by the impish charm of the leads pratting
about. Barring some tangents to do with the titular duo's lives - Julie's
cousin from her childhood reappearing and Celine potentially becoming a
celebrity magician - the narrative is entirely about the mysterious house,
filled in with a great depth for the characters and the general charm of the
film because of its length. Neither is this a "difficult" film which
requires some mental dissection of the content. Jacques Rivette could be seen as a poster boy for very dense art
films because a) his films can be exceptionally long, including thirteen hours for
his mythical white whale Out 1 (1971);
2) he usually tackles serious subjects, serious drama and/or plays with the
form of his work by way of theatre and pulp genres that do need mental
dissection to them; and 3) as someone who has been lucky to see films of his
many can't, most of his filmography is impossible to find, which adds a status
of an "Art" filmmaker even if the third point is not connected to
what is in the films. Celine and Julie
Go Boating is a lovable marriage when an art film, comparable to similar
films like Le Pont du Nord (1981) and
Paris nous appartient (1961) in
Rivette's filmography, also happens to be the comedic romp in the director's
CV. For one of the more under seen members of the French New Wave compared to a
Jean-Luc Godard or a François Truffaut, this is one of his
most commercially successful movies, thankfully not having had to sacrifice the
director's distinct trademarks in the process but meaning the stars were
aligned for once for its success.
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Obvious film viewing metaphors
abound, as every time one of the protagonists leaves from a trip to the mysterious
house they have a sweet in their mouth that lets them "watch" the
events within when the sweet is sucked, but it's not interesting to view the
film just in this light. The film is about the concept of storytelling in
general - its title "Go Boating", though it doesn't translate fully
from French to English, means to be engrossed in a story being told and the
phrase in English immediately brings about going for a lark. Celine tells
Julie, from the bathroom to another taking a shower, of a journey through
Africa. She tells friends of an American female friend. The protagonists tell
each other how the melodrama in the mysterious house will play out. A character
in the melodrama tells a macabre fairytale that reveals the divide and conflict
between the two women of the house. The stories intertwined with it are those
within theatre, within children's fairytales, and much more, willing to make
jokes at the expense of them, even have Celine damage a children's book in a
library by tracing her hand within it with a felt tip pen, but also celebrate
it as the protagonists are in awe of what could happen in the tales told. Magic
is interconnected to it, magic in fairytales always allowing for more of the
tale to be told by taking it into a new direction. A magic circle drawn in the
soil kicks off the film and it is intertwined with the storytelling from there
on.
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It's far too fun to watch Celine
and Julie go between being rapt and mocking of the film-within-a-film that
takes place in the mysterious house and in their general adventures, men mostly
assigned to a few minor character or an extra with lines of dialogue. It makes
no sense to view the film as a ode to "smartness" as Armond White calls it when the tone of
the movie makes the entire notion of even bringing that concept up in any
context laughably pretentious, pretence the only thing that the protagonists
mock with any cruelty in the melodrama when they are mostly rivet(t)ed by it
sincerely. The notion, whilst there is an immense intelligence with a
meta-commentary within this, that you'd only read the film as an intellectual
piece would've be mocked by the characters themselves and rightly so. The only
thing that one has to contend with, when its completely breezy for the most
part, is that it's not "funny ha-ha", a comedy that doesn't have
punch lines. The pleasure is as much found in how it aesthetically weaves
together its content, shot in a real urban city where bystanders aren't extras
but watch on with curious fascination as the viewer does at what the actors are
doing in front of the camera, but in a tale where the ordinary environments of
libraries to dressing rooms develop magical properties.
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Lengthy dialogue scenes that are Rivette's trademarks populate the length
of the film, with Rivette always feeling
like drama which has been allowed to breath, are matched by its irrelevant tone.
Its apt that the dialogue heavy melodrama in the mysterious house that engages
us and the characters with its more arch yet fascinating tone, visually
compelling through the ornate beauty of Bulle
Ogier and Marie-France Pisier as
well as the frayed emotions seen on their faces, is matched by a more anarchic
and spasmodic energy of Labourier and
Berto. You can be assured that the
more difficult aspects of Rivette the
director which you will have to work with is the structures, while the drama in
his films is almost always rich and emotionally driven, as much in this
irrelevant romp too or you would've wanted to strangle the protagonists for their
excitable energy instead of loving them. The dialogue sequences give way to a
fantasy tale where the solution to the narrative is through a homemade potion,
dinosaur eye rings, and a farcical undermining of a theatrical melodrama. It is
an arty film but games are being played by the film itself as well as the
characters. Everything I adore about the film is in its complete lack of
pretension but without becoming conventional and stolid, having what I would
find to be Rivette's trademarks
seeing more of his films. I think this was the first films of Jacques Rivette I saw, seeing it at
university in the library DVD shelves and renting it out no less, amongst the
art books and literature on the above floors, so it does mean a lot as the
first impression was as good as on the multiple viewings.
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Abstract Rating
(High/Medium/Low/None): Low
Celine and Julie Go Boating is a very low key in terms of its
fantastic nature, the lightness of tone and presentation meaning that it never
becomes a completely unconventional film in terms of a dream logic and similar
areas. A more likely candidate for a higher rating would be Rivette's Duelle (une quarantaine) (1976), a tale of warring witches in
mortal reality which takes the unconventional presentation of scenes to each
other and the dynamic of realism with fantasy further than with this film. That's
not to say aspects of Celine and Julie
Go Boating don't stand out though in this area. The film-within-the-film is
set up as fragments, eventually interconnecting and becoming one cohesive
narrative, watching it alongside the protagonists as if it is being recollected
from memory, including sudden cuts to black for a few seconds comparable to
recollecting said memories. One sequence, which I didn't pick up until this
viewing, has the protagonists, when they both go into the mysterious house for
the first time, interchanging in the role of the daughter's nurse, which both
play at various times beforehand. Repetition abounds in the film, from the
moment the intertitle "Usually it begins like this" starts the film to
how scenes between the protagonist repeat but with them switching places. The film
itself, after seemingly breaking the pattern, repeats itself in the final
scenes; if the movie had been six hours long, it would've imagined how things
might've played out differently or the same if the ending gives any
inclination. The result means that, while not the most abstract film I've seen
of Rivette's, it still stands out for
how its tone matches the fun content.
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Personal Opinion:
It's amongst my favourite films
and one of the few I've watch a few times. Because its playful. Because its
charming. Because it's still an unconventional art film, but never becomes
pretentious. Because like Daisies
it's proudly feminist but not through a forced artifice which sacrifices being
a good movie to promote a good message, but as a good movie which also happens
to have a good message inherently within it without having to make a
song-and-dance about it, the inherently nature meaning its allowed to be
absorbed without distraction. Because it blows raspberries at dour dramas. An Alice In Wonderland vibe is
understandably felt, though it feels more inclined to the trait from the story
of games and the energy rather than the content, anarchism in the form of
coarse language and sexual frankness that occasionally breaks through felt, not
to mention frank pride in women. It's a film where the title is a metaphor but
the characters do eventually go boating which is a perfect way to encapsulate its
qualities.
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Everything is quaint right down
to the real locations themselves, becoming a labyrinth of places where new
discoveries can be found, able to suddenly bump into a long missed person or
get into brief hijinks, possibilities all over the locations to be tripped over
alongside all the cats that seem to populate every frame and even have the
final shot of the film in tribute to them. Apparently they were just there in
the scenes when Rivette filmed in the
locations they are found in. Film critic Jonathan
Romney once pondered, in an extra for the film's British DVD release, that
the aforementioned cat you see in the final image may have dreamt the entire
film that takes place. It doesn't feel that absurd an idea. Cats are
interconnected to the history of magic and they are actually good luck charms when
kept as pets in theatres, the mysterious house when the finale starts becoming
an elaborate theatre production, right down to what is called the "three
knocks" found in French theatre to tell the audience when the curtains
were about to be raised, a cat standing guard outside its front door almost all
the time. It also feels appropriate because the film is so carefree, so
drastically contrasting, even against, the stereotypical notion of an art film,
usually seen as dour and glum, that the idea a cat has been asleep imagining
this scenario is as appropriately silly as the content.
Having never written a thing
about my thoughts on the Tetsuo
films on any personal blog or film community site, and this is bearing in mind
I have yet to see the third film Tetsuo:
The Bullet Man (2009), the obvious way forward would to cover the original Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989). But revisiting
the films it's the second that I was compelled to see again first. The Iron Man is a film that I hold
highly, having seen many times. Body
Hammer is a film I've only seen once many years ago, the more mysterious to
visit as it took on a very different tone as a continuation of the first. The film
could be seen as a remake but it becomes a vastly different work. What effects
viewing it is that Body Hammer lifts
plot tropes from the first film, but the results are different altogether. Shot
in colour and with a more structured narrative, a salary man Taniguchi Tomoo (Tomorowo Taguchi)and his wife Kana (Nobu Kanaoka) are terrorised by two bald
men who shoot the husband with a mysterious gun that causes mutation. After a
tragedy with their son, the husband transforms into an Iron Man like in the
first film, an experiment lead by Yatsu (director Shinya Tsukamoto) with a
scientist and his lair of musclemen to make a gun that can unlock the Iron Men
in anyone shot with it.
