Céline and Julie Go Boating
1974, directed by Jacques Rivette
Céline and Julie Go Boating opens with Julie inscribing a triangle inside a circle in the sand. She’s apparently casting a spell from her book of magic, and Céline soon walks by as if Julie had conjured her. After an eight-minute chase the two women connect the next morning at a café, and in the following scene we find a clue to the magical sign that set everything in motion. While Céline traces her hand with a red marker in a library book, Julie presses a red ink pad and stamps her fingerprints on a sheet of paper. Each woman is forming either the outside or the inside of a red hand. The cipher in the sand had also joined an inner and an outer figure, as if Julie were summoning her other half, bringing her inner and outer selves together.
But if this is the case, who is the inner self and who is the outer? In the library it’s Céline who traces the outline and Julie who fills the hand shape, but during the chase Julie stays outside while Céline goes into a theater, a funicular, and a hostel. As a stage performer Céline may hold the advantage in glamor, while Julie is more extroverted, but glamor and sociability could just as well be hidden inner traits as outer fronts. The inner-outer division is itself ambiguous – it could refer to the conscious and the unconscious, or simply to the public and private selves. In the end it doesn’t necessarily matter who is which, or how exactly the division is defined. What’s more important is that the unitary woman behind Céline and Julie should complete her adventure as a whole person.
A few clues point to Céline and Julie being one person. Céline has been working at the haunted mansion as a nanny, but Julie happens to have a picture of the mansion in her trunk. At her first appearance, Céline drops her sunglasses right when Julie lowers her own glasses. Céline tells how she had once become a redhead (like Julie) on an African adventure, and Julie guesses uncannily at the existence of a little girl in the mansion before she’s told. When Olivier walks in on the two nannies they pretend to be one person preening herself at a mirror.
The two women swap roles with increasing frequency. While Julie enters the mansion alone, Céline puts on a curly red wig to pose as Julie on a date with long-lost playmate Gregoire (“Guilou”). Likewise, while Céline’s in the mansion, Julie takes over her burlesque magic show, momentarily donning a black wig. The fact that Guilou mistakes Céline for Julie in the wig, while the theater manager recognizes the difference without the disguise, is a riff on how men fail to see past women’s exteriors. In these twin scenes Céline sabotages Julie’s romance and Julie sabotages Céline’s career, but neither one seems to mind being sabotaged. Bringing the two halves of the personality together is evidently more urgent.
The unification of Céline and Julie continues in the haunted mansion. For the first two hours and five minutes they alternate visits to the house. Next, while sharing the magic candies side by side on Julie’s trunk, they appear in the house interchangeably. Finally they pay one last physical visit, this time entering the house together. Only now, acting in tandem, do they succeed in rescuing Madlyn, pulling her out of the looping sequence of events that culminates in the girl’s murder.
The motive for all this is given away about an hour and a half in when Julie, finding herself locked out of the mansion, visits the cottage next door to find her long-lost Poupie, an elderly woman who had taken care of her years back during her mother’s absence. Their conversation reveals that Julie grew up in that cottage and remembers a little girl her own age in the mansion. The magical excursions into the strange melodramatic world of the big house, therefore, represent an adult’s confrontation with her distant childhood memories. It’s for this purpose that she must reconcile her inner and outer sides to become “whole” or mature. All of this is foretold in the tarot cards when Julie draws the hanged man and Lil tells her, “Your future is behind you,” the corollary being that her past must be ahead of her. Later, when she draws the mansion on her blackboard, she hangs a doll upside-down beneath it, linking the house to the prophecy.
The journey is not the obvious psychoanalytic regression, however. She’s not rescuing her past self nor confronting her own parents. Instead she saves a neighboring girl for whom she apparently feels some kinship. By taking the place of Madlyn’s nurse, whom Julie had feared as a child, she’s beginning the process of neutralizing her own childhood fears, of entering the adult world that used to terrify her. By locating the drama in the house next to her own, she puts the therapeutic drama at a safe distance, allowing her to translate her specific antagonisms into a generalized confrontation with memories of an adult world she could not comprehend before. (The two women are surrogate mother figures, a prospective stepmother and a maternal aunt, but Olivier’s vow not to remarry and the taboo against dressing as the dead mother both prohibit a too close parental substitution.) During the final visit, Olivier, Sophie, and Camille become progressively more pale as if their blood were draining away. Finally, after rescuing Madlyn, Céline and Julie take the girl boating, and the three adults from the mansion glide eerily past, bloodless and immobile. Together with the distance of the view and the opposing directions of the two boats, we get an intuitive sense that these once-frightening figures have been rendered harmless. As strange as the tale has been, we can recognize a truth in the surreal image because it corresponds to a perspective that every mature adult has come to discover.
If distance aids in giving perspective, it’s both amusing and enlightening that cats add a further layer of distance. They observe the human story, tacitly reminding us how strange we are, that we have to reconcile disparate elements of our being and go to such pains to reconcile different stages of our experience. The very last image is a cat, and it registers as a note of both whimsy and mystery. At the mansion’s portal – the interface between two worlds – we find, as the two women finally enter together, both a kitten and a grown cat, as if to identify the exact gulf that Céline and Julie are crossing.
Julie’s pet fish Harold also plays a key role, but its dual function depends on two clues at nearly opposite ends of the film. Toward the end, right before the discovery of Madlyn’s murder, when Olivier propositions the nanny Angèle, he suggests a trip to the sea. Angèle protests that the sea is impossible for her. “The mere sight of a fish gives me amnesia.” Julie has been living with a fish, presumably looking at it every day, and her whole effort to connect with Céline and enter the events of the mansion corresponds to overcoming the amnesia that separates an adult from her inner child. Harold and Céline/Julie are also equated, however. He’s an angelfish, alluding to Angèle, and he’s a triangle in a round bowl like the figure in the sand that first united the two women. The likeness is only symbolic, though – Harold will drink the potion that transports the women into the mansion when the candy runs out (the mixture being a more adult version of the candy), but in the context of everything we’ve seen, inside and outside the mansion, his masculine name implies a lack of agency. The feminism of Céline and Julie Go Boating consists in the women completing their own journey, without the help, for example, of a male psychoanalyst or a father figure.
A consistent duality runs through Céline and Julie Go Boating, pointing to the psychological rifts that the story must cross – two protagonists, two worlds, two colors of candy, two colors of apples, two colors of hair (also between Camille and Sophie), Guilou’s ring and the rings with baby dinosaur eyes, a chimpanzee in Céline’s dressing room and a toy monkey in Madlyn’s bed. Each world has a trunk, one with memories of childhood (dolls), the other with memories of a dead adult (the mother’s dresses). Julie lives on a hill (Montmartre) on a street named after another hill (Rue du Calvaire), whereas the mansion is below street level at an address that suggests depth (7 bis, rue du Nadir aux Pommes). Madlyn, however, complicates the duality. She’s the third woman in the boat; she appears in the bathtub where each protagonist had showered before; and the two red hands in the library are echoed in the bloody handprint on the pillow when Madlyn is found dead. Julie understands though that binaries like life and death are not so simple, and in her colleague’s tarot reading she points out that the death card may signal transformation.
Céline and Julie Go Boating is itself a story of transformation, but it’s not so simple either. It wasn’t quite accurate to say, above, that the film began with Julie’s nested shapes in the sand. The real beginning is a title card in the manner of a silent film:
“Most often, it began like this ~ ”
At the end, after the boating scene, as if it’s been foretold, we see it start again, this time with Céline chasing Julie. Inner and outer selves are equivalent after all, and the story begins again. There were earlier hints of cyclical time – fashions repeating every twenty years; the four seasons; and the four parts of the day, which are reflected in the four elements of the magic potion. We often think of the psychoanalytic journey, or any narrative of transformation, as a single arc building to a triumphant cure or some final state of well being, but it’s more true to life to suppose that we go through the process repeatedly, always re-assembling ourselves in order to confront our past all over again.
CONNECTIONS:
The Wizard of Oz – Story in which all the men are weak and all agency resides in women
Vertigo – Name of Madeleine or Madlyn associated with memory (Proust reference); elaborate tale reflecting the workings of psychoanalytic theory
Cléo from 5 to 7 – Tarot cards at or near the beginning with Death signalling transformation; tale of personal transformation with hints of a recurring cycle; the name “Cléo” (on a poster in the library in Rivette’s film)
The Shining – Balance between psychology and the supernatural; ending that posits a recurring cycle; omen of murder written or stamped in bright red
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown – Insinuation that a woman becomes self-sufficient when she overcomes her internal division
Enemy – Two characters representing different sides of the same person
CREDITS:
In the spirit of Jacques Rivette’s collaborative filming method, which relied heavily on the performers’ creative input (in disagreement with Truffaut’s Auteur Theory), this essay owes much to the contributions of my Autumn 2025 National Film Movements class at Flagler College. Individual students are cited on the credits page if their observations had not already occurred to me, but the whole class showed remarkable perception.