Name: Céline and Julie Go Boating
Director: Jacques Rivette
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Fantasy
Released: 1974-09-18T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 193 min
Cast: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder

A daydreaming librarian and a nightclub magician cross paths on a summer afternoon, and within minutes one is chasing the other through a Montmartre park like a figure who has wandered in from the wrong story. That collision powers Jacques Rivette’s most beloved film, a sprawling comic game in which two women turn the act of play into a method for pulling a narrative apart and putting it back together on their own terms.

The craft decision that organizes everything is a piece of candy. Céline and Julie stumble onto a house where the same hushed melodrama plays without end, a chamber piece of a sickly girl, a brooding widower and two women circling his dead wife’s memory, and a sweet dissolved on the tongue lets them slip back inside it, first as eavesdroppers, then as saboteurs. Rivette treats the candy as an editing tool. It gives the film permission to rewind, replay and eventually rewrite its own footage, so that watching becomes revising, and a haunted house becomes a cutting room the two heroines can walk straight into.

The two leads built this film as much as its director did. Juliet Berto, as the magician Céline, and Dominique Labourier, as the librarian Julie, share the writing credit with Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier, the pair who haunt the looping house. That authorship shows on screen. Berto and Labourier shaped much of their own dialogue, and it plays that way, alert and unforced, closer to two friends improvising than to actors hitting marks. The performances have the loose, invented texture of actors who own their characters rather than illustrate a script, and the film’s shagginess reads not as sloppiness but as design, a structure held together by two women deciding, scene by scene, what happens next.

Within Rivette’s career this is the warmest and most inviting entry in his long obsession with performance, conspiracy and theatre. Where his other marathon experiments can feel like puzzles built to keep an audience at arm’s length, this one opens the door and hands you the candy too. It is the film that softened a difficult, forbidding reputation into something closer to delight, without surrendering the formal daring that built the reputation in the first place.

Much of the running time is openly improvised, shot in long takes that let the actors find the scene while the camera waits. The camera often simply holds while the two of them talk a moment out, and the film trusts that watching them think is enough to carry it. The melodrama trapped inside the house is deliberately stiff, a wax-museum theatre piece the two friends first watch, then narrate, then invade, and the contrast between its airlessness and their loose, giggling freedom is the whole joke and the whole argument. Nothing is explained. The rules of the candy and the house are simply obeyed, the way children obey the rules of a game they are inventing as they go.

A new restoration does not make the film an easy sit. It runs well past three hours, much of it unhurried, and it asks for a patience a sharper image cannot manufacture. The Korean booking is a limited repertory event, not a wide opening, and a re-release is finally an act of canon maintenance rather than fresh news. Anyone arriving for the tidy machinery of a modern mystery will find the loops meandering long before they turn hypnotic.

What the film argues, without ever announcing it, is that a story is something you can enter and edit rather than merely receive. The half-century of puzzle cinema that followed, the doubled women, the nested realities, the narratives that fold back on themselves, reads in hindsight like a long echo of what two friends do here with a haunted house and a bag of sweets. The film makes no claim on that lineage. It simply arrives there first, and does it laughing.

Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier in Celine and Julie Go Boating, 1974 — Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier in *Céline and Julie Go Boating* (1974)

The principals are Berto, Labourier, Ogier and Pisier, with Barbet Schroeder, better known now as a director, as the widower at the centre of the loop; the screenplay is credited to the four actresses alongside Eduardo de Gregorio and Rivette. The running time is a committed 193 minutes, and the film sits somewhere between comedy, drama and fantasy without ever settling into one. The 4K restoration cleans up the grainy 16mm surface while keeping its handmade warmth intact, sharpening the image without shortening the film or smoothing its shaggier detours.

The restored Céline and Julie Go Boating opens in South Korean theaters on September 30, 2026, in what amounts to the film’s first proper Korean theatrical run. The same restoration has already passed through cinemas elsewhere, a US revival in 2021 and European re-releases before it, so the Korean date is less a premiere than the newest stop for a classic that keeps finding fresh rooms to play in.