
Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating). 1974. France. Directed by Jacques Rivette. Screenplay by Rivette, Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Buller Ogier, and Marie-France Pisier. With Bulle Ogier, Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier. DCP courtesy Janus Films. In French; English subtitles. 193 min.
Perhaps the most beloved and joyous of all Rivette-Ogier collaborations, Celine and Julie wears its influences—from Alice in Wonderland to Henry James, the Marx Bros. to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes —with a kind of erotic, gossamer breeziness. “Jacques doesn’t just want you to play a role,” Bulle Ogier would recall. “He wants you to inhabit it, to come up with things in some wild improv.” And so Ogier’s writing credit lies principally in this process of invention and reinvention, in playing with genres from comedy to tragedy to fairy tale, in nesting stories within stories and films within films to give a shimmering sense of that fantastical world that lies beyond the looking glass. As the hemophiliac who surrounds herself with flowers, Ogier appears as some sort of phantom diva: “I felt like playing it in a way that paid tribute to silent movies…very mannered, very posed, very sophisticated.”