Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15688 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-09-25
• Rating: Suitable for 12 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Full Screen, PAL
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 192 minutes

DVD Description
Rivette's rarely seen yet biggest commercial hit, is an exhilarating combination of the themes of theatricality, paranoia and la vie parisienne, all wrapped up in an extended and entrancing examination of the nature of filmmaking, and film-watching. Celine (Juliet Berto), a magician, and Julie (Dominique Labourier), a Librarian, meet in Montmartre and wind up sharing the same flat, bed, finance, clothes, identity and imagination. Soon, thanks to a magic sweet, they find themselves spectators, then participants, in a Henry James-inspired 'film-within-the-film' - a melodrama unfolding in a mysterious suburban house with the 'Phantom Ladies Over Paris' (Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier), a sinister man (Barbet Schroeder) and his child. The atmosphere, however, is more Lewis Carroll, with Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier as twin Alices. The four main actresses improvised their own dialogue in collaboration with Rivette and scriptwriter Eduardo de Gregorio.

Acknowledged by director Susan Seidelman as a huge influence on her own hit film Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Celine and Julie Go Boating was Rivette's greatest commercial and critical success - its freewheeling, playful spirit still capturing the imagination of new audiences today. Extras New filmed introduction by Jonathan Romney on Rivette and Celine and Julie Go Boating Toute la memoire du monde (Alan Resnais, 1956, 20 mins, English subtitles) The Haunted Curiosity Shop ( R W Paul, 1901, 2 mins, silent) Illustrated booklet including a review by Tom Milne; interviews with Dominique Labourier, Juliet Berto and Jacques Rivette; Susan Seidelman's reflections on her Rivette-inspired Desperately Seeking Susan; director biography.

Synopsis
Acclaimed 1974 French flick directed by Rivette.

Customer Reviews

A warning to the curious...
This film isn't for everybody. When I saw it recently at the National Film Theatre, more people walked out over the course of it's 3+ hours than I'd ever seen at a cinema screening, not out of offense but out of boredom. To begin with, it feels loose and airy and virtually plotless as the two title characters encounter each other and gradually become inseperable. As they begin their odyssey, the film tightens up and kicks in to a series of repetitions of a bizzare scene Celine and Julie are drawn back to again and again. I've read reviews which would suggest that this is a surreallist film but, far from being completely irrational, it is shot through with meaning - it's themes are friendship, childhood and memory, coming to terms with the past; and then there's always the strange mystery story unfolding directly on the screen.

It isn't the sort of film that will effortlessly entertain you - the viewer is expected to take a few steps to meet it: it requires a commitment that few other films do in terms of suspension of disbelief, emotional involvement, not to mention the sheer time it takes. If you feel ready though, I'd suggest a darkened room, phones turned off, watch it from beginning to end. There's a good chance you'll find it as delightful as I did.

Strange and fascinating
I've never done reviews before but feel compelled to write something about this glorious film, which i saw at the NFT last year. As we sat down to watch and then realised it was over 3 hours long, my girlfriend and I agreed to give it an hour or so before nipping out to get something to eat as planned.

Try as we might, it just proved impossible as the narrative, although at times bordering on painfully slow, gripped us both with the question of what was going to happen to the women, their relationship, and in that house! There are a lot of surreal aspects to this film but that doesn't make it irrational, rather it draws you in and, if willing, makes you think about the various pictures, objects and characters and their relation to each other, as well as the nature of reality.

A lot of the difficulty with watching this film comes during large, slow-moving scenes in the middle, but if you persevere as we did, you are rewarded with an increasingly fascinating and amusing finale in which the narrative becomes progressively quicker and the scenes ever stranger.

In the end, the desire to work through the story provided our incentive to stay, and i'm so glad we did; the twist at the end as well as one of the most sublime pictures in a film i've seen making it, for me, a captivating experience.

Against my expectations, I loved this film, and hadn't been so enraptured by a movie since seeing Cinema Paradiso (though for very different reasons).

A Masterpiece
On first viewing I wasn't sure just how much I actually liked this film, but the characters are so memorable (if slightly annoying at first, particularly Julie's repetoire of squeaks, squawks and yelps!) that I just had to watch it again.

There is actually a lot more going on here than is first apparent, but you have to be receptive to it, and patient - as with all of Jacques Rivette's films. You won't get a 'quick fix' from a film like this, but you will get something much deeper if you give it a chance.

Like Tarkovsky, Bergman and Bela Tarr, this is the kind of film that repays patience, and can have a profound effect...