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"There are movies that (just as there are people who) take such pleasure in themselves that you can\u2019t help but admire them. It\u2019s contagious \u2014 they are enchanting precisely they so openly revel in their movie-ness. \u201CCasablanca\u201D may be the best-known, but the supreme example is surely Jacques Rivette\u2019s 1974 \u201CCeline and Julie Go Boating,\u201D starting a revival run in a new 35mm print, this Friday at Film Forum.The most experimental of nouvelle vague directors, Rivette was here concocting a recipe for a cinematic joie de vivre so heady it might be sustained for three-plus hours. \u201CCeline and Julie\u201D is verdant, airy, and playful \u2014 at once a leisurely exercise in narrativity, a comic rite of spring, an extended riff, a genial incantation, and a feminist buddy film. Harpo-mop Julie (Dominique Labourier), a librarian with a scholarly interest in the occult, and mercurial Celine (Juliet Berto), a pouty stagemagicienne, cross paths and form a friendship based on playful role swapping and mutual mind-reading.There\u2019s a measure of preciosity but the actresses are resourceful, unafraid, and often very funny. (New York Times reviewer Nora Sayre characterized Berto as \u201Ca defiant, ruthless clown.\u201D) Whimsy is grounded by the vulgar schoolyard pranks and submerged eroticism of the pair\u2019s telepathic rapport. \u201CCeline and Julie\u201D is scripted but it has the free-associative feel of a fantasy created by two imaginative kids over the course of a long summer vacation. (Truly, Rivette learned the lessons of his open-ended, quasi-improvised 14-hour epic \u201COut 1\u201D; \u201CCeline and Julie\u201D is his rules of the game in more ways than one.)The movie\u2019s first act is a long, playful hide-and-seek pursuit across Paris; in the second act, Celine and Julie become accomplices, investigating the sinister doings in a seemingly haunted house. They relive their discoveries as shared memories, triggered by some magical sweets (part Proust, part \u201CAlice in Wonderland,\u201D part mescaline). The situation becomes more explicitly cinematic when they discover that the house is offering a continuous loop showing of the same domestic mystery.Alternately horrified and hysterical with laughter, Celine and Julie watch a pair of mannered mam\u2019zelles (Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier) slink around in murderous competition for the affections of a fatuously morose widower (the film\u2019s producer Barbet Schroeder). Thus, the movie turns into an essay on spectatorship that, in its delirious third act, has the duo intervene in the melodrama they have been critiquing. Their high spirited, improvisatory style alternates with the over-determined, claustrophobic atmosphere in manner that suggests Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang battling for control of the universe. What\u2019s magical about \u201CCeline and Julie\u201D is the way it conjures up so many earlier movies (Feuillade\u2019s serials, \u201CDuck Soup,\u201D \u201CLast Year at Marienbad,\u201D \u201CBand of Outsiders,\u201D Vera Chytilova\u2019s \u201CDaisies,\u201D to name a few) while seeming completely sui generis.At the same time, \u201CCeline and Julie\u201D seems to have cast its spell on such disparate subsequent films as \u201CIrma Vep,\u201D \u201CMulholland Drive,\u201D \u201CIn the City of Sylvia,\u201D and especially Madonna\u2019s most respectable vehicle, \u201CDesperately Seeking Susan.\u201D It seems to have always been with us but, like any cult film, \u201CCeline and Julie\u201D required time to find its audience. Hailed by its devoted early champion Jonathan Rosenbaum in both Sight and Sound and Film Comment, \u201CCeline and Julie\u201D had its US premiere at the 1974 New York Film Festival (along with Rivette\u2019s even longer \u201COut One/Spectre\u201D), then waited over three years for a commercial release.In early \u201978, New Yorker Films opened the movie at the Cinema Studio where, if memory serves, it lasted less than a week. Some 10 months after that, before vanishing into the realm of Rivette retrospectives and one-day revivals it got a brief run downtown at the Public Theatre. Senior critic Andrew Sarris had two more commercial openings by nouvelle vague directors (Claude Chabrol\u2019s \u201CViolette\u201D and Eric Rohmer\u2019s \u201CPerceval\u201D) that week and so \u201CCeline and Julie\u201D was reviewed for the Voice by its neophyte third-stringer, moi: \u201CThe quintessential French movie of the past 15 years \u2026 an original and entertaining metaphor for film-watching and, perhaps, film history.\u201D Decades later, that history is unthinkable without Rivette\u2019s glorious intervention.Indeed, having newly revisited \u201CCeline and Julie,\u201D I could not help but superimpose its premise over the weekend\u2019s two other outstanding releases \u2014 the superlative comic-book (or pure cinema) son-et-lumiere spectacle that is \u201CThe Avengers,\u201D and the lovingly restored re-release of Shirley Clarke\u2019s landmark 1961 adaptation of Jack Gelber\u2019s dope opera, \u201CThe Connection.\u201D While it\u2019s superhero business as usual to watch the eponymous Avengers vie with Loki for control of their scenario, it would be truly fabulous to watch Celine and Julie insert themselves into and take control of \u201CThe Connection\u201D\u2019s Pirandellian ritual.Read more J. Hoberman in Movie Journal[content:advertisement-center]"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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