Céline and Julie Go Boating

Jacques Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau) opened in 1974 and won the Special Jury Prize at Locarno. In 2022 it entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll, some fifty years after Rivette had been thought of as the most experimental of the French New Wave's directors and the least commercially exposed. It runs three hours and twelve minutes, and the title is French slang for going on a wild ride.

Julie (Dominique Labourier), a Paris librarian, sees Céline (Juliet Berto), a magician, drop a scarf in the Luxembourg Gardens and chases her across the city. The two women become friends, then perhaps the same person. On separate visits they fall into a strange Parisian house where the same Henry James-style melodrama plays out every day, and they come away with sweets in their mouths whose flavour helps them recover what happened there. Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier are the two phantom women who play out the melodrama inside.

Rivette developed the film in close collaboration with his four lead actresses, who are credited as co-writers. Its central conceit, a film that holds its own audience inside it in the shape of Céline and Julie watching the melodrama, has made it a permanent reference for filmmakers and theorists of metafiction. Its reputation has climbed steadily. We would put it alongside Out 1 as the most fully realised work of Rivette's career, and among the great European films about female friendship.