Case Study No. 1338: Julie

Celine & Julie Go Boating (fan-trailer)
1:53
Celine & Julie Go Boating available on Region 2 DVD from BFI at Amazon.co.uk.
Tags: Celine_&_Julie Go_Boating fan_video
Added: 3 years ago
From: mlord0423
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From wikipedia.org:

Celine and Julie Go Boating (French: Celine et Julie vont en bateau) is a 1974 French film directed by Jacques Rivette.

Shot casually in a documentary style, we see a red-haired woman - we will learn that it is Julie (Dominique Labourier)--sitting on a bench in a pleasant but rather non-descript Parisian park. She is reading a book, we can see, on magic incantations. But after a few minutes of random looks around the park - children playing, a cat on the prowl for pigeons - Julie is suddenly taken by the sight of a lithe woman woozily staggering across the park, a long scarf dangling from her neck. No one else seems to notice the dazed woman when she drops that scarf except for Julie, who leaps up from her park bench. She calls after her. Julie will chase after Celine (Juliet Berto), at first seemingly only on the mundane task of returning a dropped scarf. But with just that simple act, the magic of the narrative - both of this particular story and, in Rivette's meta-approach, that of cinema itself - begins.

At the start, the two women are leading relatively conventional lives, each having jobs (Julie, a librarian, is more conservative and sensible than Celine, a stage magician, with her bohemian lifestyle). The early scenes show the streets of Paris, marketplaces, and the steps and railway of Montmartre, which are shot in straight forward, realistic style favored by the nouvelle vague. As the film develops, Celine and Julie separate from the world by leaving their jobs, moving in together, and gradually becoming obsessed with the mysterious and magical events in the old house.

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From alaeditions.org:

Celine and Julie Go Boating [Celine et Julie vont en bateau] (1974, France). Juliet Berto is Celine, a cabaret magician, and Dominique Labourier is Julie, a red-headed librarian with a taste for tarot cards. In one scene, they are spying on each other in the library - Julie stamps cards indiscriminately and Celine tears pages out of books. In another, Julie (who is smoking at the front desk) asks a patron if he would please smoke more discreetly. Later they break into the library in the middle of the night and steal an old book of magic spells they need in order to fulfill their mission.

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From byui.edu:

PHANTOM LADIES OVER PARIS [Celine et Julie vont en bateau / Celine and Julie Go Boating] (1974). Juliet Berto is Celine, a young magician, and Dominique Labourier is Julie, a pretty, red-haired librarian. They form a symbiotic bond and travel together on a journey described as "Alice in Wonderland meets Cocteau."

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From mfah.org:

This magical tale recounts the adventures of librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier) and the flamboyant Celine (Juliet Berto), who acts as a kind of White Rabbit leading Julie through the Looking Glass into a world of imagination. With some memory-inducing candy, Celine and Julie plug into a bizarre drama in a mysterious house. They enter disguised as nurses and encounter two women in love with the same man. The widower promised his wife he would not remarry as long as their daughter was alive. As the competition in the triangle reaches a murderous level, the high-spirited heroines plot a daring rescue of the young victim. One of the seminal films of 1970s, Celine and Julie Go Boating is a brilliant meditation on the art of cinema and the nature of fantasy.