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.

Some directors use less than 2% of their footage in the final cut but Rivette must have used 92% of his to make this - perhaps he used absolutely everything, including, apparently, out-takes. Tedium sometimes has a point, but not here. This is annoying-tedium for every scene seems calculated to test our patience. There's no humour or verve or flair or great lines or classic scenes, not even sad attempts at those things, only a forced drollerie that falls flat in every scene There is endless silly giggling, scenes such as those in the nightclub that are just tiresome to watch, fantasy sequences that are presumably meant to look like a corny TV sitcom, but, lacking any scrap of humour, the point is entirely lost and the actors flounder. The girls try far too hard to be cute, and only succeed in being cloying. And I'm waiting for a director to grasp this simple truth: that giving the actors free rein does not make the action more spontaneous and natural, only more strangulated, more self-conscious, more unnatural and cringe-inducing than if they were following a consistent and meticulous script.After a while you realise Rivette is just playing silly buggers. Fluffed lines are left in, characters glance inadvertently-deliberately at the camera. Rivette will be saying: 'Regard, c'est un film that is pas un film, we're deliberatement toying avec your illusions'. I'm saying: Vous etes un wankeur.Why three hours? A Senses of Cinema article is eager to explain: 'The tradition of rigid adherence to the 90 minute to 2-hour time frame, enforced by the laws of free market capitalism, is exploded by Rivette. As a filmmaker, Rivette refuses to confine himself to these arbitrary lengths, or to the even more arbitrary, if unspoken, rules about demands on subject matter and mise-en-scène in films of epic length. Instead, Rivette extends the lengths of his films to a point beyond necessity, where it is understood that the film's length in and of itself is a statement about the system he works in and rebels against.' 3 hours simply to defy (capitalistic??) convention? Wankeur.The audience are the dupes here - poked fun at for trying to apply reality to what is self-consciously only a film. This is not New Wave. I'm gazetting Rivette as a hanger-on, a copyist. He wants to shoot in the style of Rohmer, but he hasn't got Rohmer's indefinable deftness. He wants to break the rules like Godard but he has not got Godard's indefinable style or charisma. He wants to say something meaningful in an offhand way, like Truffaut, but he hasn't got that indefinable intellect for it. All he can do is try. You can feel him trying. It boils down to a single lame joke that isn't funny and a single idea that isn't clever. Three hours of film-flam, tiresome beyond belief.

It's quite an amazing experience, and I mean that in good and potentially Bad-WTF-Is-This-Anything ways. In a way it reminded me of the sci-fi short film Heaven is Now, if it were more like Inception. And in French. And it didn't have really much music at all. Matter of fact what makes the film so unique and strange and both highly entertaining/engaging and off-putting sometimes in the same scene is that it's less about is story than it is more like a documentary Rivette shot on how much these two women (Juliet Berto as Celine and Dominique Labourier as Julie) love laughing and giggling at the silly scenarios and dialog they've come up with (they were also co-writers). It's as much about watching them, how much chemistry they have together as friends and bosom buddies (so to speak) as it is about watching what they watch in their 'visions'.In short, it's about... still not totally sure exactly. The 'plot' that's to speak of (and really, who should care about that anyway, but I digress) is that these two women, Julie and Celine, meet by chance after one drops sunglasses or something and the other one follows the other to return them - all across the city. And then they strike up a friendship, based around... I suppose that they're both amiable young women who have a fancy for magic. That is, one of them is officially a magician, the other is a librarian (I think). And then... one of the women, Celine I think, goes into some strange house. Why she does go there I don't remember - perhaps thinking back now is like a dream unto itself - but when she emerges it's like she's totally drunk, stumbling around, and has a hard candy with her. When she eats it, she can see what goes on at the house, which is basically like a macabre daytime soap opera ghost-directed (so to speak) by Alfred Hitchcock.So it goes, the two women get drawn more and more into this realm of the 'house' and these people, particularly a little girl who seems subjected to the cruel, Bunuelian streaks of these rich people who roam around in a trance (maybe they have done a better job already than Tim Burton could've ever done with his Gothic 'Dark Shadows'?) and it turns kinda like into a drug movie. Or a hallucination movie. And all the while Berto and Labourier, both attractive in their own way if not gorgeous, more like naturally pretty (for Julie, and she was sweat-stains under her arm-pits, how rare/cool is that to see in a movie?), and both actresses are having a ball in this movie. That's the key for me I think; for the length that it's at, and it's pretty goddamn long, and for how obtuse things can seem (i.e. that scene at the sink where the woman's hand is bleeding and the nurse - interchangeable from shot to shot of the two leading ladies, a gag that gets funnier and weirder the longer the movie goes on), there's always a sense of play.In fact, Celine and Julie Go Boating is one of THE movies about how to 'play' in cinematic terms, and not only that but watching other people play. It turns into an Inception deal where we're the audience to the audience that is the macabre nightmare that is a home life (and with Barbet Schroeder as the husband!) There are some stretches in the film, like when Julie is by herself in the apartment looking over a picture of her ex-boyfriend, that just goes on too long, and grows into tedium. But there's no other film like it, and when Rivette and his ladies hit their stride it brought me into its arms that would sometimes combust and dance and giggle, especially in the last 40 minutes or so when Celine and Julie go together (not separate) into the house. Maybe the girls should count themselves lucky: it could've been the house out of Hausu.

The first thing i could say about this film is: it is certainly not for every taste. First of all its plot is totally non-liner, second this movie deals with strange themes in a very strange way, third it has the typical for the french cinema slow development of the act and fourth - it is over three hours long. It is a film about magic and friendship, about two women and their fascination with each other and with magical tricks. It is also a Jacques Rivette movie and I think any one who has watched some of his other films will notice it - it is an extremely long enigmatic movie with interesting dialogues shot in a beautiful way. It somehow reminds of L'Amour Par Terre but is not so dark. This movie can be considered as a comedy, a drama, a thriller or a mystery but first of all it is an experimental film with notes of surrealism and at least for me one of the biggest masterpieces of the french new wave.