Celine and Julie are great sleepwalkers in movies. When they look in the Looking Glass, they refer not only to the helpless spectators of Lewis Carroll and Jean Cocteau (like Orpheus, they will even find themselves in a car carrying them from one world to another), but also to Duck Soup and Groucho Marx, who is always on a different plane of reality than Mrs. Dumont.
There's a plot here - a little girl is going to be killed. They must save her; In other words, they must preserve the symbol of innocence in the world (or home) of the conspirators of the wicked. Celine and Julie are like children whose perceptions alienate everything we take for granted and are more attentive to the outside world and its bizarre social rituals. They know nothing about the world except the one they create. The only wish Julie expresses throughout the film (besides saving the baby) is to return to her childhood home. After all, only children are allowed to create and enter - or enter and remake - Wonderlands and Neverlands. The whole world in quotation marks: text. They play with dolls like they do with people.
Like Renoir, the relationship continues as long as it continues to change and eventually disappears. But the fantasy life becomes plausible in Celine and Julie, because the fantasies here, infinitely smaller, are aimed not at order, but at subversion, not at stability, but at constant mutations and metamorphoses. Both girls are sorcerers, and as if by a spell, small works of art become real; the characters come to life.
Celine and Julie are two sides of the same person, each of which is really just an excuse for the antics of the other. We see Rivette move for the first time to Shakespeare and the world to a fool's paradise.
Alain Rob-Grier, who deliberately denied any genres in literature and cinema, speaking in one of his interviews about detective stories, referred not only to Gilles Deleuze’s “Logic of Meaning”, but also to Karl Popper, implying the possibility of certain black holes in the narrative, one way or another depriving the viewer and the reader of any hope to specifically find out in the final who is the real killer. Real art, completely unconstrained by any genre framework, is impossible without the presence of elements of doubt in its fundamental construction; this emerging doubt should not be spontaneous, the author himself is obliged to give birth to it, making the viewer the main accomplice of the whole action, but this concept, which Rob-Grier himself used with obvious success in his films and books, and collaborating with Alain René, is applicable only where the subjective reality of cinema is dichotomous, parallel. The reality of, say, conventional theater and film play, similar to the game of beads, if we talk about all the contexts and simply the texts of the French New Wave.
Notable from this point of view is the film “Selina and Julie went on a boat ride” by Jacques Rivette in 1974, where fiction and reality are densely mixed with the manic author’s idea of absolute naturalness, pure cinema in essence. Moreover, this program film Rivetta turns out to be almost a mirror image of “Last year in Marienbad” due not only to its extragenreity, but also to the interweaving of many alternative realities into tight sea knots, but unlike René, Rivetta’s film is less abstract, less conditional, mobile in its vital contact with the flesh of being outside the frame, outside the windows, outside the theater, while the same springy intrigue with the murder of a child is divided into even larger, deeper, subliminal, and unconscious ones, like my own identity. These images, in which it is easy to count the feminine philosophical ciphers of De Beauvoir and Oettinger, at first seem extremely mundane; the director seems to snatch them from the vain rhythm of Paris outside its center. And much later, the reflection curves of Selina and Julie will appear in Catherine Bray, Virginie Depant and Coralie, François Ozon. Ordinary girls, almost inconspicuous, but if Jacques Renard’s camera abandons static detachment, the viewer himself turns into a kind of voyeur, watching first Selina, Julie, and then them together, in the cramped stuffiness of their home. Rivette rhymes his film with both Antonioni's "Photomagnification" motif of undercover co-authored spying and "Mommy and the Whore." Estash is the theme of an eternal dialogue with both himself and the viewer, because the film gives rise to a lot of questions due to the presence of lacunae in the emerging plots, sometimes false, often complex, but most disturbing in its vacuity. What if the second reality is that of Selina and Julie? What if this is all from beginning to end a projection of the author’s fiction? What if, after all, everything is false?! Doubt becomes the meaning of the entire space of the Rivette tape.
It is obvious that like Godard, René, Truffaut and the rest of the newcomers, Rivette in “Selina and Julie...” shot a movie about cinema and cinema for the sake of the movie itself, sometimes comparing its spontaneity, the opportunity to play the same take again, but with different nuances of the game, image, with theatricality, the otherworldly, chthonic world of the theater, where the actor becomes a hostage of his own impossibility on the stage to correct his mistakes. Interfering in an alien world, Selina and Julie begin to change it; Rivette himself seems to destroy in this way the classical foundations of theatrical art, turning all the divertissement in the Gothic house of conditional chimeras and horrors into Becket-Harmsian absurdity, leading to the very black hole of the narrative when the completeness of the plot is impossible. Only if the director himself does not wish to interrupt this infinity of dreams and awakenings, the vacuum created by the layering of several realities, the radiant and yawning emptiness of the finale inevitably lead not to the solution of the mystery, but to new myths and dreams. At the same time, Selina and Julie play, reflect, improvise; playing them is the lie that in another reality of the old dark house detonates the processes of destruction, dying, violent death. And the theme of Thanatosticism begins to prevail in this extragenre author’s construction, where postmodernism meets Mannerism, the spirit of cinematic improvisation with total theatricality. The author’s intention to change faces but not places turns out to be an exceptional fiction, a lie about life and a lie about death, which is prevented in order to return to the beginning. Paradoxically, death becomes a new life, a metaphysical process of rebirth of one person into another, the process of the changeability of the theater to perfect cinema, and Rivette, whose rich cinematic language is multilingual and multi-sounding, affirms the triumph of a great multitude in the overwhelming emptiness of the world that he created, so quickly rejected Celine and Julie, starting to play first in truth, and then in lies. This false, formalist artificiality turns out to be a new form of Rivette’s filmmaking, re-forming reality, forcing us to doubt our insistence, untouchable until the moment of immersion in the Kafkaesque world, where both Selina and Julie go by boat. The river like Charon takes their souls, along the way and covertly cleansing them of alluring playfulness. Rivett’s Mobius loop, in which Selina and Julie are stuck, is inextricable, and the existentialist search for himself turns into an even more sinister maze, from which one can only get out even more by rejecting one’s self. But for the sake of immortality, because if hell is a repetition, a refrain of refrains, then what is paradise? The possibility of an answer cancels its rhetorical essence, because hell is realized in Selina and Julie. The director disputes the claim that life is theater. His life and the lives of his heroines, identical with Rivette himself, is a movie itself that paradoxically lies, embellishes and tempts, distorts and eludes. Rivette, like René, derives his genetic code for cinema, which is as free as the will of his demiurge can be.
Alain Rob-Grier, who consciously denied any genres in literature and cinema, speaking in one of his interviews about detective stories, referred not only to Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Meaning, but also to Karl Popper, implying the possibility of certain black holes in the narrative, one way or another depriving both the viewer and the reader of any hope to specifically find out in the final who is the real killer. Real art, completely unconstrained by any genre framework, is impossible without the presence of elements of doubt in its fundamental construction; this emerging doubt should not be spontaneous, the author himself is obliged to give birth to it, making the viewer the main accomplice of the whole action, but this concept, which Rob-Grier himself used with obvious success in his films and books, and collaborating with Alain René, is applicable only where the subjective reality of cinema is dichotomous, parallel. The reality of, say, conventional theater and film play, similar to the game of beads, if we talk about all the contexts and simply the texts of the French New Wave.
Notable from this point of view is the film “Selina and Julie went on a boat ride” in 1974 directed by Jacques Rivette, where fiction and reality are densely mixed with the manic author’s idea of absolute naturalness, pure cinema in essence. Moreover, this program film Rivetta turns out to be almost a mirror image of “Last year in Marienbad” due not only to its extragenreity, but also to the interweaving of many alternative realities into tight sea knots, but unlike René, Rivetta’s film is less abstract, less conditional, mobile in its vital contact with the flesh of being outside the frame, outside the windows, outside the theater, while the same springy intrigue with the murder of a child is divided into even larger, deeper, subliminal, and unconscious ones, like my own identity. These images, in which it is easy to count the feminine philosophical ciphers of De Beauvoir and Oettinger, at first seem extremely mundane; the director seems to snatch them from the vain rhythm of Paris outside its center. And much later, the reflection curves of Selina and Julie will appear in Catherine Bray, Virginie Depant and Coralie, François Ozon. Ordinary girls, almost inconspicuous, but if Jacques Renard’s camera abandons static detachment, the viewer himself turns into a kind of voyeur, watching first Selina, Julie, and then them together, in the cramped stuffiness of their home. Rivette rhymes his film with Antonioni’s “Photomagnification” motif of hidden co-authored peeping, and with Estash’s “Mommy and the Whore” theme of eternal dialogue with both himself and the viewer, because his film raises a lot of questions due to the presence of lacunae in emerging plots, sometimes false, often complex, but most disturbing in its vacuity. What if the second reality is that of Selina and Julie? What if this is all from beginning to end a projection of the author’s fiction? What if, after all, everything is false?! Doubt becomes the meaning of the entire space of the Rivette tape.
It is obvious that like Godard, and René, and Truffaut and the rest of the newcomers, Rivette in "Selina and Julie ..." shot a movie about cinema and cinema for the sake of the cinema, sometimes comparing its spontaneity, the opportunity to play the same take again, but with different nuances of the game, image, with theatricality, the otherworldly, chthonic world of the theater, where the actor becomes a hostage of his own impossibility on the stage to correct his mistakes. Interfering in an alien world, Selina and Julie begin to change it; Rivette himself seems to destroy in this way the classical foundations of theatrical art, turning all the divertissement in the Gothic house of conditional chimeras and horrors into Becket-Harmsian absurdity, leading to the very black hole of the narrative when the completeness of the plot is impossible. Only if the director himself does not wish to interrupt this infinity of dreams and awakenings, the vacuum created by the layering of several realities, the radiant and yawning emptiness of the finale inevitably lead not to the solution of the mystery, but to new myths and dreams. At the same time, Selina and Julie play, reflect, improvise; playing them is the lie that in another reality of the old dark house detonates the processes of destruction, dying, violent death. And the theme of Thanatosticism begins to prevail in this extragenre author’s construction, where postmodernism meets Mannerism, the spirit of cinematic improvisation with total theatricality. The author’s intention to change faces but not places turns out to be an exceptional fiction, a lie about life and a lie about death, which is prevented in order to return to the beginning. Paradoxically, death becomes a new life, a metaphysical process of rebirth of one person into another, the process of the changeability of the theater to perfect cinema, and Rivette, whose rich cinematic language is multilingual and multi-sounding, affirms the triumph of a great multitude in the overwhelming emptiness of the world that he created, so quickly rejected Celine and Julie, starting to play first in truth, and then in lies. This false, formalist artificiality turns out to be a new form of Rivette’s filmmaking, re-forming reality, forcing us to doubt our insistence, untouchable until the moment of immersion in the Kafkaesque world, where both Selina and Julie go by boat. The river like Charon takes their souls, along the way and covertly cleansing them of alluring playfulness. Rivett’s Mobius loop, in which Selina and Julie are stuck, is inextricable, and the existentialist search for himself turns into an even more sinister maze, from which one can only get out even more by rejecting one’s self. But for the sake of immortality, because if hell is a repetition, a refrain of refrains, then what is paradise? The possibility of an answer cancels its rhetorical essence, because hell is realized in Selina and Julie ... in the theater. The director disputes the claim that life is theater. His life and the lives of his heroines, identical with Rivette himself, is a movie itself that paradoxically lies, embellishes and tempts, distorts and eludes. Rivette, like René, derives his genetic code for cinema, which is as free as the will of his demiurge can be.
Imagine a director, a cameraman and two actresses making a movie. The script, as such, is not and the plot moves are compiled in parallel with the shooting. Actresses, for the most part, throughout the film improvise, without going beyond certain limits of the plot, which is not and no one knows what the continuation of the story. Another way to describe the film “Selina and Julie...”, to be more or less accessible, is not possible. There's no point! But you have to see it!
“What is happening on screen? What kind of nonsense are the actresses? – this will be the initial emotions of the viewer, who ventured to master the three-hour film a-la “free flight of thought”. It is unlikely that he will overcome it the first time. But then, if it comes back to viewing, it will be impossible not to watch it to the end, at least for the sake of interest. The story begins with one girl running almost all over Paris after another girl who loses her belongings on the move. Gradually, the chase turns into some kind of game, which is fun to play Seline and Julie. And everything that follows in the film is perceived as a game of two charming French women. Girls “exchange lives”: Selina goes on a date with Julie’s boyfriend, Julie performs in a “cabaret” for the poor instead of Selina. It's all so comical!! The incident leads Julie to an old mansion. When she left, she did not remember what happened to her. After telling Selina about this, they take turns visiting the mysterious house. Every time they go out, they get lollipops that cause them visions with sound, which they watch as a movie, getting sucked into the lives of the strange occupants of that house. At some point, they decide to influence the outcome of history and become its participants.
The late 1950s and 1960s were the period of the “new wave” in French cinema, when young directors, former film critics or journalists, began to shoot low-budget experimental films. Jacques Rivette was one of the founders of this movement. “Selina and Julie were completely lying” is one of the last echoes of the period that gave rise to similar trends in cinema in Europe, Japan and the United States.
I’m not going to write a clever article about the features of the “new wave” movies and draw parallels between Rivett and Lynch. I am not going to analyze the language of symbols in each episode. I will not even sing glorifying ode to actresses, so wonderfully fit into their roles.
I'll just write about my impression.
I have watched this film in several ways. Short sessions of 30-40 minutes.
At one point it seemed like I was being told a story. But the narrator forgets where he left off yesterday and repeats himself, afraid to miss something important.
I can't hide that I missed you at first. But with each passing minute it was harder. I wanted to know how this game would end with time and space.
The game is over, but who won remains unclear. Everyone decides for themselves what the end of this story is.
I’m not saying this movie is a must-see. But for film lovers, it will certainly bring pleasure.
7 out of 10
Rivette's film is set in Paris, but Paris is obviously not postcard - Oh, horror! The Eiffel Tower has never been photographed. From the first shots, the director offers the viewer an “action scene”: a conditional red-haired woman in glasses is pursued through the streets of the city (here I wanted to use the adjective “claustraphobic”, but I am afraid this was not part of Rivette’s plans) a woman n2 (brunette). After 20 minutes, the picturesque chase ends in nothing, and the plot begins to build up some meat. In particular, it is possible to understand that the redhead works like a librarian (and yes, you can smoke in libraries, only to quietly take note), and the brunette is something like a “illusionist for the poor.” And it seemed like they had a place to be outside the film space, although who knows? They are united by one strange at first glance hobby: every day they take turns going to the “cursed old house”, after visiting, which absolutely do not remember anything. However, rather quickly the ladies find a way out in the form of “matrix lollipops”, which have a curious property – at the time of absorption (aha, don’t be dirty, Hi Fry and Laurie), the events of the previous day are reactualized in audiovisual forms (in other words, Selina and Julie together watch a movie about what happened to them).
At this point, one wonders whether Rivette knew Timothy Leary. Although the ISS interpretation of what is happening reeks of mauveton, so the most sensible option would be to fit “Selina and Julie” into the genre of “movie cinema”. That is, of course, the interpretation field is not limited to contextual reading and, it is possible to work out the narrative of the film, but there are strong doubts about the productivity of this step. And so, starting somewhere in the middle of the film, the viewer is transferred from the insane reality of the present to the theatrical drama of the past (apparently a haunted house, but not the essence), each of the Mademoiselles participates in a strange action on five in the image of a nurse. The action is repeated repeatedly from different perspectives with the help of those very lollipops. The pretentiousness and unnaturalness of what is happening are emphasized by the fact that for the heroines what is happening is cinema (the most lethal moment: Celine offers Julie to get distracted and have a smoke). And since the heroines are all right with infantilism, the role of a simple spectator quickly bored them. We need to get involved and change the ending! The essence of the quest is to save the murdered girl, but judging by the play of actresses, the heroines are driven by a pure fan. Well, the final, as it were, refers to the famous aphorism: “If you watch a movie for a long time, then it looks at you.” Not a revolutionary statement, filmed with delicacy and self-irony, but unlike the same “Malholand Drive”, with which associations inevitably arise, cinema is completely devoid of suspense.
8 out of 10
This film with such an intriguing and unconventional title has been on my list of movies for a long time. However, when it finally came to “Selina and Julie” and I began to dive into the depths of what was happening on the screen, I gradually began to get a feeling of deep bewilderment – more and more, more and more. At some point, the bewilderment reached its critical point – what absurdity do I look at, what is the point here at all? You ask yourself: is this the way, in this spirit - more than 3 hours!? The meaning and logic of the plot peripitations are always eluding, and I confess that I managed to overcome the picture not in one sitting, or even two. When my patience ran out, I pressed stop again and returned to viewing after 3-4 days. It took as many as 8 "inclusions" to watch the film in full.
At first, everything is somewhat intriguing. Julie (Dominique Labourier) is sitting on a bench reading a book. (Look what the book is—the cover says “Magie.”) A brunette girl runs past her, who behaves quite strangely - ruffled, rocking, dropping things ... Julie picks up the girl’s glasses, tries to catch up with a strange stranger and return her glasses, but she, feeling the “chase”, runs away with more enthusiasm. Julie apparently wakes up excitement - she, too, adds effort in her strange chase. At some point, all this begins to seem absurd: one girl persistently runs away from persecution, afraid of not knowing what, another with no less tenacity catches up with the first, it is unclear why. The chase is long, stubborn... I wonder how this will all end!? The first intermediate result: yes, nothing, the “persecuted” left the “persecuted”. But here's a new twist: the next day, the two girls meet in the same place they broke up yesterday. After that, they essentially change their roles: yesterday’s “persecuted” – her name is Selina (Juliet Berteau) – turned into a “persecutor” herself, coming to Julie’s work in the library and secretly watching the latter. And finally, Julie and Selina in some not very logical way (okay, omit) become inseparable friends, live in Julie’s apartment in Montmartre, and chat from morning to evening, talking nonsense. By the way, the name of the picture in translation from French just can be interpreted as “Selina and Julie are nonsense.”
That’s the absurdity of Rivette’s film. It goes on no less, but also b>omore absurd. And the first time you get through it, you almost get through Harms' stories. Not exactly, but almost. The author seems to say to the viewer: for me, the primary immediate meaning is not important, here is the secondary, tertiary meanings (the second, third bottom) and the idea itself is yes. To be fair, I must say that when you re-watch the film, you simply notice all these hidden nuances, completely invisible in the “first reading”. For example, divination on Thoreau’s maps in the library – Julie’s colleague predicts the girl: “The future is already behind you ... you rush into the depths of the night ... you do not move, you stand still ...” Already here is a vague hint of the further course of the picture. Or something like this: Julie and Selina sit in the library, and independently draw almost the same things.
All right, all of this is just a little bit more. The absurd grows stronger as the plot progresses. The girls begin to take turns visiting a mystical house, in which they both asceticize as nurses. That is, in reality, that strange house - clearly not from our time, but somewhere around the end of the XIX-early XX century - has its own permanent composition of participants, plus a nanny, in the role of which alternately (while their replacement is invisible to the "Aborigines") are Julie, then Celine. Permanent composition: widower Olivier (Barbet Schroeder), his young daughter Madeline (Natalie Aznar) and two competitors for the vacant place of Olivier's wife - Sophie (Marie-France Pisier) and Camille (Bulle Augier). Thus, in J. Rivette’s film, two realities intersect, two parallel plots, and the object of intersection of these realities is Julie, interchangeable with Selina. The means of intersection is a kind of “candy”, a hallucinogenic pill, laid under the tongue. The main task is to save the girl Madeline from death. The goal, although ephemeral, but you will agree, noble – you need to at least try to implement it.
Yes, absurd. But did anyone promise us predictable realism, or dull melodrama? Nope. And you know, it's all unconventional, interesting and, as you go to the finish line, even exciting. Gradually you catch yourself thinking that the denouement of the plot is not so important as the process itself, the whole "bulaghan" of what is happening on the screen. After watching it, I learned that both of the leading actors improvised during the filming of the film, came up with separate phrases and moves themselves - this explains a lot, and I like this approach. In a sense, what Selina and Julie do is run around. Everything returns to the same point from which it all begins – isn’t this a subtle philosophical technique, isn’t this the “route” of our whole life?
8 out of 10