Part of Weekend Classics: Beat The Heat
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland meets the freewheeling invention of French New Wave gamesman Jacques Rivette in this giddy surrealist fantasia. When magician Céline (Juliet Berto) meets librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier), it’s not long before they are launched through the looking glass and straight into a labyrinthine comic adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder mystery — as, all the while, the line between illusion and reality grows ever fainter.
“It’s not just that the film holds up to repeat viewings; its very point is its seemingly infinite repeatability, its mysterious capacity to surprise both first-time viewers and those who know it as well as a magician reciting an incantation.” —Dennis Lim, New York Times “A genre-bending masterpiece of female friendship and surrealism, CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING is arguably the most famous work from Rivette…. It is a head-scratching Russian doll of a story that is ultimately an ode to movie-watching and moviemaking itself.” —Kristen Yoonsoo Kim, The Nation
