Mulholland Drive & Celine and Julie Go Boating (Lynch/Rivette Retrospective #6)

This is the sixth entry in a series covering the Lynch/Rivette retrospective at Lincoln Center, running from December 10 - 22. I attended a double feature of Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) and Mulholland Dr (2001) on the evening of Saturday, December 19.

These are the films. If you're asking me for my personal favorites I would probably go with the wilder and woollier Fire Walk With Me and Out 1. But it's incredibly easy to see why Mulholland Drive and Celine and Julie Go Boating are considered their directors' masterpieces, and why they have become the go-to initiation rites for anyone hoping to fall under David Lynch's or Jacques Rivette's spells. J. Hoberman called last night's double feature, with some trepidation, a "surfeit of cinema." He's right. It isn't that films like Lost Highway or L'Amour Fou aren't intensely cinematic in their own right, it's just that these two titles are movie-movie-movies in the same sense as Citizen Kane, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or 8 1/2. Collecting together all of the elements present in other Lynch or Rivette films, they are rich with a sense of magic - some combination of charm, imagination, reflexivity, excitement, and depth - transforming already great films into something even more iconic.

These films also form the most logical pairing of the entire retrospective, kicking off the entire concept according to programmer Dennis Lim. Mulholland Drive and Celine and Julie Go Boating join classics like Robert Altman's 3 Women, Vera Chytilova's Daisies, and Ingmar Bergman's Persona by placing young women at the center of an alluringly fantastical world. Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Elena Harring), like Celine (Juliet Berto) and Julie (Dominique Labourier), chase their own elusive memories, mix amateur sleuthing skills with a penchant for performance, rely upon talismans to guide them through a web of intrigue, and cross interdimensional boundaries between reality and dream in order to solve a murder and satisfy their dangerous desire to penetrate an aura of mystery.

The Favorites - Celine and Julie Go Boating (#97)

Before (or after) reading this review, I hope you'll check out my first narrated video essay, which went up late Monday.

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974/France/dir. Jacques Rivette) appeared at #97 on my original list.

What it is • What if Alice, rather than following a white rabbit down its hole into Wonderland, followed another Alice? Celine and Julie are in the long tradition of female heroines entering a strange world (think not just Alice, Dorothy, and Wendy, but cinematic distaff duos in Mulholland Drive, 3 Women, or Persona) yet the extent to which these two fall into an alternate reality, and the extent to which they are creating it, is never quite clear. An air of mischievous play suffuses the film, as if the actresses - and their director - are making it up as they go along. Julie (Dominique Labourier), the seemingly more sensible Alice of the two, is a librarian who begins to chase and is then followed by Celine (Juliet Berto), our sexy white rabbit, an actress/compulsive liar who muffs Julie's love interest and tells her friends that Julie is her sister. The film's "plot" begins when the two pranksters swallow hard candies which magically transport them inside a strange, seemingly abandoned house where a morose family enacts an ever-repeating melodrama of betrayal, resentment, and grief. It's up to Celine and Julie to rescue a little girl who will be murdered - to reset this fatalistic narrative, to take control over it as they have over their own freewheeling lives. Celine and Julie Go Boating - a hard film to explain, but as much an atmosphere as a story - has been called by David Thomson "the most innovative film since Citizen Kane," and though its innovations are more in the nature of mind games than technical tricks, it really is a trip.

Why I like it •