Céline and Julie Go Boating

Two weekends ago, a small and loyal crowd stumbled out of the NFT after watching all twelve-and-a-half hours of Jacques Rivette’s very rare 1971 film, ‘Out One’. In such light it seems wimpish to draw attention to the three-hour-plus running time of this both charming and frustrating film, which sees our titular pair Céline (Juliet Berto) and Julie (Dominique Labourier) elude the film’s threat of aquatic adventures until its closing scenes and instead enjoy a magical mystery tour – aided by ingesting ‘magic rocks’ – of the streets and empty houses of Paris’s Montmartre, dipping, at points, into a parallel narrative based loosely on a Henry James novel (although Rivette never actually read ‘The Other House’). A pleasant folly, Rivette’s biggest success – critically and commercially – plays like an ensemble adventure with a dressing-up box in the streets of Paris. Berto and Labourier largely improvise their dialogue (and their costumes and even some of the story, too, I imagine), which offers the best and worst of such a pursuit. Handle with care.