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. The film entered the Sight & Sound poll's upper tier in 2022, fifty years after Rivette had been generally regarded as the most experimental of the French New Wave's directors but the least commercially exposed. The film runs three hours and twelve minutes; the title is French slang for going on a wild ride.

Julie (Dominique Labourier), a Paris librarian, sees Céline (Juliet Berto), a magician, dropping a scarf in the Luxembourg Gardens and chases her across the city. The two women become friends, then perhaps the same person; they fall — across separate visits — into a strange Parisian house in which the same Henry James-style melodrama plays out every day, and from which they emerge with sweets in their mouths whose flavour helps them retrieve the day's events. Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier are the two phantom women who play out the recurring melodrama inside.

The film was developed through extensive collaboration with the four lead actresses, who are credited as co-writers. The structural conceit — a film that contains its own audience-substitutes (Céline and Julie watching the melodrama) within the film — has made it a permanent reference for filmmakers and theorists of metafiction. The film's reputation has steadily climbed; it is now widely placed alongside Out 1 as the most fully realised work of Rivette's career, and one of the great recent European films of female friendship.