Critics reviews

The result is a joyously rule-breaking experimental feminist fantasy that tips its hat to the surrealist tradition, and the magic of silent-era serials. Be warned, there's a certain amount of hippie-era goofiness, not least in the wardrobes.

Integral to Céline and Julie Go Boating is the feeling of liquid identity, but Rivette's characters are knowing spectators to their own madness, to the ultimate collapse of their personas, their tics and mannerisms influencing and trading with each other's affectations.

The loosely guided performances are often slack, and the thin depiction of daily life lessens the power of fantasy, yet Rivette's fretful view of the dangers of stories is, in effect, a self-portrait as a cinephile on the verge of hallucination. The two women's lust for real-world companionship, their need for vicarious heroism, and their trip through the labyrinths of repressed memories come across as the director's job description.

Rivette's fondness for the fantastical is integral to the picture's accessibility. Despite the slew of literary references – from Marcel Proust to Henry James – and the shifting metaphysical states, it's a tricksy, playful film that absorbs the viewer into its unique world.

For all of its reputation as a film studies favorite and perennial thesis subject, CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING is ultimately a great giddy fib of a movie, and probably the breeziest three-hour film ever made.

In Rivette's unsettling ending the movie reboots, with Céline chasing after Julie this time, and the effect is unflinchingly purgatorial. Don't let the women's smirks and wordplay fool you: The fact that art is eternal often makes it more horrifying than life itself.

It's not just that the film holds up to repeat viewings; its very point is its seemingly infinite repeatability, its mysterious capacity to surprise both first-time viewers and those who know it as well as a magician reciting an incantation.

That any movie could successfully wield and weld the dual primary influences of Hawks' facetious ode to capitalism (but ode nonetheless) and the anti-capitalist Situationists' double principles of the dérive and détournement (and just look at the inside of Céline's house to see how they've recreated the world as collage) is an achievement. Céline and Julie Go Boating manages to show how Hawks and the situationists are nearly one and the same.

Céline and Julie seemingly predicts, among other things, the Lacanian cinema theory of Christian Metz's Imaginary Signifier (1977) and Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (written in 1973, published in 1975). If the latter essay dissected the male's gaze and the female's "to-be-looked-at-ness" encoded in cinema, then Rivette's film is remarkable in its positioning of its female leads as both characters and spectators (mostly) in control of the film's subjectivity and outcome.

No other film had ever been quite like it, with its interlaced stories apparently set in parallel realities, its long, half-improvised dialogues full of word-games and absurd poetic inventions, its restless subversive playfulness and its sweeping tracking shots through forgotten corners of Paris.

Normally, I'd say: So what; it's cutesy personal pastiche, but what does it all amount to? This feels different, and it has to do with the passage of Rivette's personal timeline. With Céline and Julie, we move past the homage for its own sake, and we're given the infrequent insight into a director making a midstream appraisal of his own career, and an interrogation of his own predilections.

The duo's final assault on this intertextual Mobius strip is liberating and brilliantly sustained, though it nonetheless resonates with a variety of discomforting implications (read between the lines for a despondent post-May '68 commentary) that belie the overall jocularity of Rivette's presentation.