Reciprocal, reiterative pleasures in Jacques Rivette’s Céline et Julie vont en bateau

The year 2024 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Jacques Rivette’s Céline et Julie vont en bateau/Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), a delightful odyssey about two women playing dress-up, roller-skating, eating bonbons and drifting in and out of a boudoir melodrama. The film’s mercurial spirit and whimsicality have inspired a diverse range of interpretations. However, as Robin Wood observed, often readings of the film, and readings of Rivette’s films in general, are somewhat narratively impressionistic and leave one with the sense that the narratives are arbitrary. Though plenty of scholarship on the film expresses the opposite, elegantly accounting for narrative details through compelling and varied approaches (through psychoanalytic or feminist optics, for example), Wood’s observation is intriguing. Taking Wood’s claim as a point of departure, this article aims to illustrate a way to appreciate a ‘loose’ narrative film without denying its felt improvisational quality and openness. It notices a sophisticated narrative causality, one that principally manifests through acts of reciprocity and reiteration between two women. Instances of magical, reflexive interactivity are this article’s foci. Reflecting on these encounters should move us towards a fresh understanding of the film that emphasises, simultaneously, dazzling creative freedoms and strategies of exquisite, classical storytelling.