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Céline et Julie vont en bateau

Original title: Céline et Julie vont en bateau : Phantom Ladies Over Paris
  • 1974
  • Tous publics
  • 3h 13m
IMDb RATING
7.2/10
6.8K
YOUR RATING
Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974)
A mysteriously linked pair of young women find their daily lives preempted by a strange boudoir melodrama that plays itself out in a hallucinatory parallel reality.
Play trailer1:52
1 Video
94 Photos
Dark ComedySlapstickComedyDramaFantasyMystery

A mysteriously linked pair of young women find their daily lives preempted by a strange boudoir melodrama that plays itself out in a hallucinatory parallel reality.A mysteriously linked pair of young women find their daily lives preempted by a strange boudoir melodrama that plays itself out in a hallucinatory parallel reality.A mysteriously linked pair of young women find their daily lives preempted by a strange boudoir melodrama that plays itself out in a hallucinatory parallel reality.

  • Director
    • Jacques Rivette
  • Writers
    • Juliet Berto
    • Dominique Labourier
    • Bulle Ogier
  • Stars
    • Juliet Berto
    • Dominique Labourier
    • Bulle Ogier
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    7.2/10
    6.8K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Jacques Rivette
    • Writers
      • Juliet Berto
      • Dominique Labourier
      • Bulle Ogier
    • Stars
      • Juliet Berto
      • Dominique Labourier
      • Bulle Ogier
    • 52User reviews
    • 39Critic reviews
    • 100Metascore
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 1 win total

    Videos1

    Trailer [OV]
    Trailer 1:52
    Trailer [OV]

    Photos93

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    Top cast20

    Edit
    Juliet Berto
    Juliet Berto
    • Celine
    Dominique Labourier
    Dominique Labourier
    • Julie
    Bulle Ogier
    Bulle Ogier
    • Camille
    Marie-France Pisier
    Marie-France Pisier
    • Sophie
    Barbet Schroeder
    Barbet Schroeder
    • Olivier
    Nathalie Asnar
    • Madlyn
    Marie-Thérèse Saussure
    • Poupie
    Philippe Clévenot
    • Guilou
    Anne Zamire
    Anne Zamire
    • Lil
    Jean Douchet
    Jean Douchet
    • M'sieur Dede
    Adèle Taffetas
    • Alice
    Monique Clément
    • Myrtille
    Jérôme Richard
    • Julien
    Michael Graham
    Michael Graham
    • Boris
    Jean-Marie Sénia
    • Cyrille
    Jean-Claude Biette
    Jean-Claude Biette
    • Spectateur au cabaret
    • (uncredited)
    Jacques Bontemps
    • Lecteur à la bibliothèque
    • (uncredited)
    Michel Caen
    • Spectateur au cabaret
    • (uncredited)
    • Director
      • Jacques Rivette
    • Writers
      • Juliet Berto
      • Dominique Labourier
      • Bulle Ogier
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews52

    7.26.8K
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    Featured reviews

    Damion-2

    A Magic Candy Moment!

    Last year, at a crisis time of imminent homelessness, I went to the video store with the idea of renting some banal new release to distract me from my troubles. Waiting in line holding a video starring Tom Hanks (or was it Kevin Costner? Maybe it was Julia Roberts. Such a blur is Hollywood today) something in the foreign section an aisle down caught my eye. It was the video for Jacques Rivette's 1974 masterpiece, Celine and Julie Go Boating.

    Immediately upon seeing the cover image of Juliet Berto (Celine) posed as a magician, her Dietrich hauteur kinky and comical, I knew it would be my kind of film. I was also pleased to see it was such a long film it had to be contained in a two-video set. It had long been my suspicion that all secrets of life would be revealed in a film over three hours long and in French.

    Indeed, Celine and Julie is just that film. But it conceals as it reveals, which is to say that its great mysteriousness results from its floribundance of revelation. Yes, my friend, a floribundance! I never even thought of such a word until seeing Celine and Julie.

    Critics have been unable to explain what it's "about". I cannot. I can't explain the plays of Shakespeare or the poems of Emily Dickinson, but I am moved by them. Attempts to understand them can lead to intense mental spasmodics, but the pain, if the work is good, can be great.

    Those who've seen the film will remember the hard magic candy the women savored on their own path to understanding. Vision giving, the candy became an addiction to them. Once is never enough and hasn't been for me. I have seen Celine and Julie three times and thought of it many more.

    My favorite scene is where Celine performs her weird magic act in a nightclub where, as far as I can tell, the customers are all convicted poets. The atmosphere there is fascinating. Time stops while she does her act, which is beyond words, indescribable. The whole feeling in that scene of a kind of super sophisticated moment of comedy and sex and mystery all shared by a group of people in silence is one that I find marvelously inspiring. Surely some clever entrepreneur in San Francisco, where I reside, could open such a club. Oh, I suppose it won't happen, but at least one can dream.

    Really, it's the importance, power and pleasure-pain of dreaming that this film reawakended me to when I saw it months ago. To be like Celine and Julie with their minds moved by candy is a state I aspire to daily.

    When I was briefly without a place to live, I thought of this film and was taken to a sunny day in Montmarte, a house where the living and unliving mingle, a library where stalkers and smokers meet. I savored that magic, the effect of great art on the mind, and I knew I was not truly homeless.
    6cafescott

    Thoughtful but difficult

    I recommend people read "Excruciating" (federovsky, 8/30/12) and "Much Ado About Nothing" (Milan, 4/15/2012) if they want to know what they are in store for. "Celine and Julie Go Boating" is difficult, frustrating and over long. However, it is also the kind of film that after seeing it, you wonder what other people have to say about it.

    I didn't enjoy it much. Visually, it is not terribly special. The relationship between the two women and the "haunted house" is what keeps us watching, but the scenes come very slowly.

    Several people have said it unfolds like a dream. Others have pointed out the lesbian/feminist side to it. Another possibility is that the two women represent two personalities of a schizophrenic nurse who committed an unspeakable crime. That would explain the repetitive cutting between one woman as the nurse and then her counterpart switching in. The two sides of the same madwoman angle possibly explains why the story includes the woman who is a performance amateur subbing for the experienced magician.

    Between "Celine" (Juliet Berto) and "Julie" (Dominique Labourier), I think Labourier is the strongest here. Labourier has a lot of charisma; too bad Rivette has her often just laughing directly into the camera.

    The characters in the "haunted house" are interesting. Marie-France Pisier is a favorite of mine, and she is very mysterious here.

    If the scenes didn't unfold so sluggishly, and if the narrative were tighter, I think it would have been great. Unfortunately, it is too much work to recommend.
    10Asa_Nisi_Masa2

    What we miss most about our childhoods, distilled in a movie

    A PERFECT, SHARED IMAGINATION: something we become entirely incapable of evoking in our adult lives. As children, it's still possible to create an all-engrossing, parallel existence played out in symbiotic harmony by two individuals calling themselves best friends. With an uncluttered and unfettered creativity, these friends are sucked into their inner story to a point that time, place and the mundane habits and duties of one's routine no longer exist, or rather, are incorporated and/or adapted to fit what then becomes one's main existence - the imagined one. What makes this movie so convincingly evoke the yearning for the magic of childhood is exactly this: the fact that this imaginative world is shared so perfectly by two friends, and not just cultivated within an isolation and individuality typical of adult age. No other movie has made me think back at my childhood best friends as vividly as Céline and Julie Go Boating!

    Hours spent in a room surrounded by familiar objects turned into so many powerful talismans. Earnest "magic" rituals punctuated by benevolent, mutual derision in the little moments in which one risks getting too serious or devoid of irony. Convulsive giggling fits which end in snorting noises. Relaxed, spontaneous, touchy-feely languid poses making two friends feel like they fit each other's company like a glove. Living the present so perfectly that one is momentarily, blissfully freed of any baggage from the past or the insecurities for the future that stunt one's spontaneity in the present. This isn't just a definition of perfect, child-like friendship, but also of a simple, uncluttered state of pure happiness. Rivette captures the spirit of all these things - childhood and happiness - in a movie unlike any I've seen before. Or rather - the movie may have seemed familiar thematically, but the execution and spirit of it was something else altogether.

    As other users have commented here, Céline and Julie Go Boating is inspired by both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Henry James, as well as being reminiscent of Buñuel - not just his "surreal" movies but also That Obscure Object of Desire. In the latter, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina play the same character interchangeably. Céline and Julie do the same when they both, interchangeably play the nurse in the closed-circuit, story-in-the-story involving the man, the blonde woman, the brunette woman and the little girl in the "haunted" house - this story's plot is being played out over and over again in the two protagonists' heads as they strive to both figure its intrigue and the dark heart of its mystery out, all the while deriding the stuffy rhetoric of its melodrama (delightful!). There are clear echoes of Bergman's Persona as well, as Céline and Julie stand in for each other - namely, Céline pretends to be Julie when she meets her childhood sweetheart and cousin Guilou, while Julie stands in for Céline when she attends the magician's audition. Touches of Buñuel and Fellini are also evoked by the dream sequences, with their typical, fragmented rhythm which mixes in dreams, reality, thoughts and imagination. Though innovative and timeless, Céline and Julie Go Boating does also belong to the decade in which it was made, as it has a recognisable 1960s/70s surrealist aesthetic and an interest in "inner landscapes", not for their own sake but for what they say about the psychic goings on of human beings.

    Purely thematically, this movie also brought to mind Peter Jackson's 1994 movie Heavenly Creatures. However, though the latter was made exactly 20 years later than Céline and Julie, it is decidedly more "misogynistic" in spirit, to be fair perhaps not consciously or intentionally so. Why am I calling Jackson's movie misogynistic? Because ultimately, unlike Céline and Julie Go Boating, it treats the symbiotic, shared, female imagination that's allowed free rein as something negatively irrational, uncontrollable, dark and finally, destructive, the lesbian undertones becoming morbid rather than light-hearted, humorous and feel-good as in the Rivette's splendid and highly original movie.

    What this Céline and Julie Go Boating told me was that in some cases, guiltlessly cultivating, salvaging and exploring one's inner and imaginative life is far more important than meeting the expectations of one's day-to-day, material duties. Therefore, solving the mystery of a "haunted" house is more crucial than, say, furthering one's career (for example, succeeding in an audition for an important, international magician's tour - Céline should have attended it but Julie does so instead, to very amusing and disastrous effect! I loved, loved, loved actress Dominique Labourier's droll histrionics during that scene!).

    I have never seen a movie treat with such humour and gaiety a subject as serious, complex and potentially heavy-duty Freudian as exploring one's unresolved childhood issues. Much of this movie is about Julie's (and perhaps everyone's, to a degree) inability to assimilate the past completely (her tarot reading by a fellow librarian reveals this at the beginning of the movie - "Your future is in the past"). To put it stereotypically, the "inner child" needs to be freed before one can truly become an adult - a happy, healthy, sorted, serene, childlike adult. This process of healing is punctuated by the two protagonists by playful role-playing (both Céline and Julie have a ball taking on different identities by also donning different costumes throughout the course of the movie), an endless string of occasions for giggling fits and what is essentially a cheerful use of childish "drugs" (candy and home-made magic potions) to evoke that crucial, life-giving shared imagination. In a sentence, the psychic ailments typical of adulthood are cured with the spirit typical of childhood.
    10EdgarST

    Phantom Ladies Over Paris

    I saw "Céline et Julie vont en bateau" a few years after watching "3 Women" and Claudia Weill's "Girlfriends." The next day I saw it again, and then again and again... This was a time when I was very interested in the depiction of modern women in films: some were quite original and revealing, and this was indeed one of them, dealing with the creative process, and women's imagination. Made in 1974, it had a similar origin as that of "3 Women", in which the female cast (Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, and Marie-France Pisier) worked with director Rivette and writer Eduardo de Gregorio on the script. It is also a story of female bonding and solidarity, but instead of relying on dreams, it uses magic and literary sources, Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" being the first to come to mind. Librarian Julie (Labourier) becomes intrigued by weird rabbit-like magician Céline (Berto), but soon one is after the other. They become friends (or sort of) and exchange roles in each other's life, but nobody seems to notice the difference. Then Céline reveals she frequently goes inside an old house where a melodrama is repeated on and on (based on Henry James' "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes" and "The Other House"), enacted by two women (Ogier, Pisier) who are both in love with a very pale man (filmmaker Barbet Schroeder.) In the old house there is also a little girl (Nathalie Asnar) who is in danger, so Céline and Julie become the "phantom ladies" of the title (including Fantômas outfits) to rescue her. This post-modern movie is a puzzle, and the audience is intellectually involved in the making. Critics went crazy and called it "the most important film made since 'Citizen Kane'." I don't know if it is, but I love it: it is funny, demanding, entertaining, and sometimes boring, in the best tradition of Satie's repetitive "Vexations". Reworked as "Desperately Seeking Susan", without acknowledging it.
    10Galina_movie_fan

    Two Beautiful Troublemakers Go Boating

    Praised by the critics as "delicate , mysterious, and exiting", "an original and entertaining metaphor for film-watching and, perhaps, film history", and named "The most radical and delightful narrative film since Citizen Kane! The experience of a lifetime" by New York's critic David Thompson, "Celine and Julie Go Boating" (1974) is all of the above but first of all it is incredible fun to watch. This magic candy of a movie tells the story (or rather plays with the story) of two friends, Julie, a librarian and Celine, a magician. The film starts one sunny summer day in Paris when Julie follows running through the park and losing her stuff all over (a scarf, a shoe…) Celine exactly like another girl in the English country side one sunny summer day had followed a White Rabbit into a world of her imagination. Two girls became friends and soon with the help of a magic memory-inducing candy, they both will be the observers and participants in a bizarre soap-opera like drama that takes place in a mysterious house. It involves two stunningly beautiful women, a blonde and a brunette, who are in love with the same man. The man is a widower with a young daughter who had promised his wife that he would not remarry as long as their daughter is alive. When the blonde and the brunette become desperate enough to try to do something about the situation, it is up to Julie and Celine to come up with the plan and to rescue the young girl. Will they go boating? Well, you will have to stay with them for all 193 minutes to find out. Yes, Rivette takes his time but his movie never seems slow or boring. Playful yet complicated, mad and funny, "Celine and Julie" is a magic movie. It grabbed me from the opening scene - which is of course the opening chapter of "Alice in Wonderland" - and it never let go. Buniel would love this movie, I think. It also reminds me of "Mullholand Dr" and even "Persona" but in the absolutely different mode. Simply DELIGHTFUL.

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    Storyline

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    Did you know

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    • Trivia
      It is a misconception that most of the film was improvised by the actors. Jacques Rivette provided structure but did not let his actors "go wild", instead he let them write. A single scene was improvised, where Celine, played by Julie Berto, brags to her associates about her rich American friend. The rest of the scenes where shot from scripted material, mostly thanks to participating actors. The film is collaboration by several authors, including actors Berto, Labourier, Ogier and Pisier. Rivette's involvement in the writing was to give structure to all the contributions, tightening things up.
    • Goofs
      The last time Julie receives the cigarette from under the table, it is bigger than it was when her colleague handed it to her.
    • Quotes

      Julie: It doesn't hurt to fall off the moon.

    • Connections
      Featured in Berlin Chamissoplatz (1980)

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    FAQ

    • How long is Celine and Julie Go Boating?
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    Details

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    • Release date
      • September 18, 1974 (France)
    • Country of origin
      • France
    • Language
      • French
    • Also known as
      • Phantom Ladies Over Paris
    • Filming locations
      • Montmartre, Paris 18, Paris, France
    • Production companies
      • Action Films
      • Les Films 7
      • Les Films Christian Fechner
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

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    • Gross US & Canada
      • $31,452
    • Opening weekend US & Canada
      • $5,624
      • May 6, 2012
    • Gross worldwide
      • $31,452
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      3 hours 13 minutes
    • Sound mix
      • Mono
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.37 : 1

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