Film

Céline and Julie Go Boating

Name: Céline and Julie Go Boating
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Fantasy
Released: 1974
Cast: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder

Fantasy
Strange

Céline and Julie Go Boating is Jacques Rivette's shimmering, digressive masterpiece about two women who stumble into a haunted house's repeating tragedy. It's playful and strange—a fairy tale for adults that trusts you to get lost in its logic. Essential for anyone who thinks cinema can be pure pleasure and pure art simultaneously.

TMDb rating

3.4

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love films that play like games, where logic loosens into wonder and two women's giddy friendship matters more than any plot you could summarise.

Skip it if you want a story that tightens its grip and gets somewhere fast, because this one wanders, digresses and sits in its own playfulness for a very long time.

What it asks of you: Settle in for over three hours of loose, looping play, with long unhurried stretches and a shifting, dreamlike logic that rewards patience rather than close plot-tracking.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

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Persona1966

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La Haine1995

Three friends in a Paris suburb move through a day that's both mundane and potentially explosive. Like Rivette, Mathieu Kassovitz finds humanity and humour in what could be merely bleak.

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Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Céline and Julie Go Boating

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

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Both films treat entry into a magical space as a test of character and desire; both balance playfulness with genuine unease about what the mystery wants from us.

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Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory poster

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8½1963

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The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie1972

Buñuel's surrealist game where dinner never happens and nothing adds up logically—yet everything means something. Playful formal experiment in the same spirit of comic unreality.

But Deliberately nonsensical. The joke wears thin if you need narrative or character development to engage.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie poster

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her1967

Godard's meditation on Paris, cinema, and desire presented as a series of fragments and digressions. Shares Rivette's faith that cinema can be essayistic and entertaining at once.

But Experimental and digressive to the point of opacity. Feels like watching someone think rather than tell a story.

Come and See1985

Both use formal complexity and genre-breaking to trap viewers inside a character's experience of reality breaking down; Rivette's is a puzzle-box, Klimov's is a descent into hell.

Elem Klimov's Soviet film follows a boy into the horror of war, shot like a nightmare where the impossible becomes routine. Same structural brilliance, inverted emotional register—pure devastation instead of play.

But Unbearably brutal and graphically violent. It's a masterpiece made to wound you; watching it feels like a moral obligation rather than pleasure.

Charulata1964

Both films locate mystery and transformation in the gaze between two people; both suggest that cinema itself is about this choreography of attention and desire.

Satyajit Ray's story of a bored upper-class wife and her husband's cousin—a study of desire, performance, and the roles we play for each other in confined spaces. Deeply romantic and morally complex.

But Indian cinema of the 1960s moves at its own pace. If you're expecting Western narrative structure, the emotional ellipses will feel like gaps.