Celine and Julie Go Boating

Saw Celine and Julie Go Boating, a confusing film. For example, the title event does literally occur, they do go boating, but it's almost the very last thing they do and of almost no importance. The film follows the librarian Julie and the magician Celine. They meet in a park after Julie draws a magic circle in the dust with her foot. Celine breaks Julie out of her hum-drum life, disrupting her library job and rejecting her lovers in her guise. Julie seems to be inspired by Celine's very presence into rebelling in childish, self-indulgent ways and is soon giving as good as she's getting, spoiling Celine's professional advancement as Celine has spoiled Julie's romantic advancement.

The film relies on cinematic short-hand for these scenes. Julie is being contacted by an old childhood love who we are to understand, by virtue of his childhood loveliness, is a perfect mate. Similarly Celine's career is going to receive the big break it needs when two sun-glasses-wearing suits watch her preform. This opportunity is destroyed by Julie in an interesting, almost fourth wall breaking, performance. The lover is rejected in similarly strange, unreal ways. Left with only each other, they find a house and enter it one by one. Within the house they have a strange experience which they cannot understand or remember except in brief flashes.

After resorting to further magic, they uncover more of the experience in the house. They realize the events in the house repeat once a day starting at noon, leading Julie to quip that it's a matinee. This is a hand-tipping moment for the film I feel, revealing the house be a metaphor for a film (or a play, perhaps.) They bring their film-breaking, magical irreverence to this strange event as well, doing their best to pry into its workings. We have now entered into meta-film territory where the going gets worse. In one scene Julie and Celine recall the events of the house via magical candy. They sit side-by-side reacting to their synchronized memories, but looking exactly like they're watching TV. They laugh and gasp at seemingly random times, or perhaps with hip, ironic, irreverent sophistication.

As the women dive deeper into the magic, they behave less and less conventionally, becoming sort of liberated feminist witches, one could argue. The two women become more intensely connected, initially revealing a psychic link of some kind by echoing words an thoughts. I wondered if there might be a lesbian undertone to their relationship, but it seems like a too modern take on this film (which comes from the 70s.) The central women are fun and winsome and make the film very fun (at one point, they burgle magic books from their local library and roller-skate away, dressed in catsuits.) I also believe this film to have inspired David Lynch. In addition to the connections to Mulholland Dr. (two women with a strange, intense relationship, the theater and theme of reality/theatricality) there's strangely intense scenes of inscrutable activity and slight morbidity although the pixie-like women stop the film from diving into true Lynchian nightmare. The film is quite long (3 hrs) so take care, but I think it's worth it if you can stay awake long enough. An interesting film.