Celine and Julie Go Boating

Director: Jacques Rivette

Cast: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier

1974 / 193min / DCP

The product of a close creative collaboration between Rivette and stars Juliet Berto, Bulle Ogier, and Marie-France Pisier, Céline and Julie Go Boating is a delightful nesting doll of a film, a work of stories within stories, and arguably the apex of its director’s singularly playful oeuvre. Berto and Dominique Labourier handle the title roles with pluck and aplomb, playing a magician and a librarian who, with the help of magic confectionaries that recall Lewis Carroll, find themselves drawn into a haunted house murder mystery loosely inspired by Henry James’s “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.” “Strange and delightful… A comedy about moviegoing.” —Jonathan Rosenbaum