At 154 minutes and French to boot, "Celine and Julie Go Boating" ('Cline et Julie vont en bateau,' 1974) is a bit much for any reviewer to expect a reader to run out and see, which is probably too bad.
With this in mind, and just to be thorough about my intentions, here is the spoiler: Julie (Dominique Labourier), and Celine (Juliet Berto), and a young girl they steal from a house which is haunted with ghosts who must repeat the same day of murderess drama over and over, do go boating. It's at the end.
Right. With that out of the way, let's get to what "Celine and Julie" is really about. Magic.
The two women meet after a chance encounter in a park, where Julie is reading a book called "Practical Magic." Immediately one understands their personal chemistry, which continues throughout and is probably the charming part of an extremely charming film.
Both women are beautiful and disarming. What really shows in Jacques Rivette's film is how much they constantly seem to be enjoying themselves.
This is part of how the movie works despite its otherwise unthinkable length -- it is impossible to watch Celine and Julie without having fun along with them, even for the two-and-a-half some-odd hours the film takes.
To exposit: Celine later shows up in Julie's house with a cut and a strange story. She talks about a house where she worked but seems vague on the details. Julie lets her in to her apartment to clean up.
While Celine makes up extravagant lies about her travels in Africa, Julie ruthlessly riffles through her things and unpacks them. When Celine comes back out, she accepts the new living arrangement without a moment of hesitation. Not a moment of malice ever passes between the two.
Celine falls asleep just as Julie asks her the address of the house where she worked, probing the origins of this mysterious girl. When Celine wakes the next morning, Julie asks her again.
Celine says she told Julie the address the night beofre. Julie makes up an address, which she seems to be remembering, or vice-versa, and later that day, Julie visits the house with the address she made up and finds it to be haunted, where to summarize absolutely they steal a girl and row off in to the sunset.
Enough of exposition.
Celine and Julie's magic is the kind of magic I like -- the kind that sneaks in to life when you're too happy to care.
Julie finds a haunted house with an address she makes up herself to let her friend pretend she has already remembered. Julie has a bottle of pills in her cabinet with the same name as Celine's (extremely sexy) magic act. As the two row away with the girl, a boat full of ghosts from the haunted house rows the other way.
But the magic in this movie does not draw attention, in entertains the girls but never causes conflict and it always seems like the kind of magic we'd all like to have in our lives.
Care is taken to keep anything in this film, which doesn't otherwise stretches the bounds of rational thought until its last few minutes, from being taken too seriously.
At one point, Julie and Celine run out of the candy they have been using to vicariously live this repeating and murderous day. Not wanting to leave themselves hanging, they rob a local library to find a recipe for a sort of memory frozen drink.
First, this is totally unnecessary, as Julie works in the library already. Second, the women rob the library dressed from head to toe in black diving suits.
Then, they escape on roller skates. Finally, when Julie and Celine drink the potion back in their apartments it is obviously spiked and one of the actresses, Dominique Labourier, seems to be quiet non-fictionally drunk.
If magic exists in this world, it takes the form of the spells and enchantment of "Celine and Julie." It passes without question, it builds friendship instead of drama and it happens to people who are so charmed with the thrill of simply being alive that, in the end, it does not matter anyway.
And this is how you feel after seeing "Celine and Julie" -- like being alive and finding magic everywhere.
