Though I did not pick a distinct theme for my Criterion films this year, I feel like I inadvertently picked a number of films that pair nicely with each other. I had the lonely women going on vacation movies (Now, Voyager and Summertime), the bunch of dudes have to work together to pull off a job movies (Big Deal on Madonna Street and The Flight of the Phoenix), and now I have my young women getting into shenanigans movies (Daisies and today’s pick). I would say Daisies and Céline and Julie Go Boating might be good double features, but they also might not, since they have kind of the opposite approach to filmmaking. Where Daisies is kinetic and abrasive, Céline and Julie is about as loose and carefree as it gets, to the point where I sometimes had a hard time grasping what I was watching, but maybe that was the point.
I’m not sure I fully understand what the plot to Céline and Julie Go Boating was, but I’ll try my best to describe it. The film begins by showing one of our titular characters, Julie (Dominique Labourier) sitting on a park bench, reading a book about magic when another woman, Céline (Juliet Berto) hurriedly walks by and drops her scarf. Julie picks up the scarf and chases Celine through the streets of Paris hoping to return the scarf for a remarkably long time, but they eventually meet in a café and quickly become friends. We learn that Julie works at a library and Celine is a magician, though the states of their identity and characteristics becomes pretty fluid throughout the movie.
The film has a lot of little detours, but the most prominent one happens repeatedly when we see both characters consistently taking time out of their day to go to this old mysterious mansion. When they walk through, we see them transported to this parallel storyline where one of them is a maid in some other timeline working for these two women going through some domestic strife. We often see Julie and Céline looking at this timeline and commenting on it from their current one, while we get other little interludes that include both women performing in cabaret acts or meeting up with random friends or family that are never introduced in any sort of traditional way. Oh, and they do eventually go boating, but it does take us about three hours in to finally get there.
So maybe I should address the biggest hurdle to get over with a movie like this, which is its lengthy 193-minute run time. I will say, there is something novel about a movie of this length that was clearly shot on a pretty modest budget and that feels like it was made by a bunch of friends playing around with the rules of cinema. It gives the film a very free-flowing, spontaneous quality, which feels appropriate for a couple of characters who are kind of just waltzing into different situations and states of consciousness. But at the same time, I definitely did tune out during several stretches of this film. It’s just not particularly focused, so I kind of feel like I might have had an easier time getting on this movie’s wavelength if it were, say, 90 minutes.
I’m not sure exactly what led me to Céline and Julie Go Boating in the first place, but it very well could’ve been that it ended up on the latest Sight and Sound list of the greatest films of all time from 2022. In retrospect, this makes quite a bit of sense since that version of the Sight and Sound list seemed very interested in films deconstructing the idea of what a film could be, considering number 1 was the fairly challenging Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Celine and Julie is a film that constantly seems to be reimagining itself, with scenes that feel only vaguely connected, though there are recurring visual motifs throughout that give the film a decent amount of connective tissue.
One of the recurring themes of the movie is magic and magic tricks, and the best way I could makes sense of the film’s stream-of-consciousness logic was that each individual scene was supposed to be a magic trick, pulling over something new on the audience. But, if I’m being completely honest, I struggled a bit with parsing what exactly the film was trying to say. Still, even if I didn’t necessarily “get” what the film was going for, I would say it still has a playful, irreverent feel to it that was easier to watch than other Criterion Month movies in the past that I’ve respected but didn’t necessarily “get”. Also, Julie and Céline do make for charming pals to hang out with, but it just felt like they were constantly telling each other inside jokes that I wasn’t completely in on.