Rijndri Load of rubbish!!

LouHomey From my favorite movies..

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Milan Having read about this movie I decided to give it a go, even though the plot didn't seem to exist in any way that could keep you interested for 30 minutes, let alone 195. I like distinctive and different films, sprinkled with surrealism, as much as I like popular classic cinema, but there has to be something that drives the story, and keeps a viewer follow it through. If the story hangs on a thin line, there has to be something other truly mesmerizing (photography, set design, etc.),that pushes a movie to another level. A series of self indulgent drama class exercises, that drag on for more than three hours, testing the patience of best-intentioned and most willing viewer to it's outer limits, is what happens in Celine and Julie. This is a sort of a movie, that has so little to offer, that your mind keeps wondering to all other places but the screen. Two leading actresses play with each other, and it drags on and on, in most parts looking like a student film of an overly ambitious but less talented student. The trick is, they keep student films to under one hour in duration, and it should have been done with this one, it might have improved it's quality. Story of mysterious house in which strange things happen is marred by silly pastiches of unexplained and often absurd actions two leading ladies undertake, in an effort to solve the mystery that has a self serving purpose, same as the movie which is trying too hard to be incomprehensible, in order to be different. And it succeeds. Whatever frenzied gallery of scenes that have no meaning for the general audience, is shown to you, and the least you understand the intentions and ideas of so called "auteur", more it will be considered by many outside of their intellectual capacity, thus, probably representing something really extraordinary.Borrowing heavily from Sedmikrásky (1966), Vera Chytilova's pearl of the Czech new wave and world cinema, Jacques Rivette, couldn't emulate it's freshness, playfulness and cinematography, simply because he didn't have the ability, and because he lost any direction he could have had, when he passed the magic mark of about 76 minutes, after which, these fountains of ideas turn to stone. Difference is coherent uniqueness, difference is Kubrick, Teshighara, Clouzot, Truffaut, Kaurismäki. Surrealist is Bunuel, Cocteau, Ferreri... Distinctive is Polanski, Allen, Melville, Hitchcock, Welles. This one is not. No plot, no cinematography, no ideas and several pretty scenes is all there is. Nothing to justify three hours of your life. Avoid.

laursene Perhaps it goes without saying that Celine and Julie is a terrific riff on Alice in Wonderland, but FYI, I'll reiterate it and give a few details. Julie chasing Celine at the outset = Alice following the March Hare hurrying down the rabbit hole. There's a (Cheshire) cat, of course. EAT ME and DRINK ME are key instructions throughout. There's even a tea party, complete with over-sized utensils.This superb, incomparable movie is a thing of wonder for sure. And of all the feminist and quasi-feminist works of art of the period, I don't know of another that revels so delightfully in the sheer fun of being a girl and/or women (and that blurs the differences between the two so tellingly). I also can't think of another film that has so much twisted fun with the ritual of watching TV (the only thing better than following the melodrama playing out in C&J's minds is watching their reactions to it).Two caveats: Much as I love long movies, C&J is a bit overlong - the boudoir melodrama plays out a bit more than it has to, and loses some of its fascination as a result. And Labourier's performance in the last third turns somewhat arch and cutesy (NOT in her "audition" scene, however, which is for the most part wonderful).Lastly, I'm again struck with wonder at the New Wave filmmakers' ability to make something extraordinary out of next to nothing. No fancy sets or costumes (the production even in the upperclass melodrama sections is refreshingly threadbare), plenty of available light, no special effects of any kind. Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, etc, were Dogma avant la lettre, without being, er, dogmatic about it. One can pore over their self-referential filmic-ness all one wants, but what they give us so generously is real people (stars deglamorized without constantly nudging us in the ribs for congratulation) and real places. Cinema that gives us the world.C&J, like all the best of the school, is something lived in.

Adrian Sweeney Anyone bored with the mundane in cinema or life should get hold of this by hook or by crook. Enchanting and exhilarating, the film defies precis but revolves around the two adorable loons Céline and Julie, captivatingly played (and brilliantly semi-improvised?) by Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier - Berto is possibly the most entrancing comedienne/sex goddess since Carole Lombard, but Labourier runs her close here and their chemistry is fantastic. I don't think that most lovely and carefree of things, female friendship, has ever been better captured on film.The style is somewhere between a slight surrealism and cinema verite - in its blend of the everyday and the utterly bonkers it reminded me a bit of the book 'Zazie in the Metro' - and in many places it's laugh-out-loud funny. The two heroines are drawn to a haunted house, whose ghostly inhabitants recurringly unfold a neurotic melodrama from an earlier epoch, contrasted with and subverted by Céline and Julie's joyous free spirits.Be warned that you should abandon any modern fidgetiness before embarking: the running time is over three hours, the opening is protracted, and the main plot takes a back seat for around half the duration. If you don't like art-house you won't like this. But somewhere in the universe there is a planet of film-lovers where this is the Christmas movie on every channel in every country every year. I wished it would go on forever and it made me feel reborn.

Edgar Soberon Torchia 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.