Films
Boating trip
Ian Cameron
Fifteen years after the completion of his first feature film, Jacques Rivette has finally achieved the evanescent status of being the director everyone is talking about. It is unfortunate that he should arrive with Celine and Julie Go Boating (Paris Pullman, Phoenix and elsewhere, AA certificate) rather than with the more obviously substantial L' Amour Fou, made in the late 'sixties and hardly seen in Britain.
Watching Celine andJulie is not unalloyed Pleasure: indeed, the film's appearance is quite unappetising, with colour so mucky that it makes you long for the days when Shoestring operations were conducted in monochrome. An intermittent lack of focus In the projection at the Phoenix, where I saw It, added to the visual discomfort.
Although it is usually described as a Comedy, Celine and Julie comes across more as a game in which the main participants are Rivette and his two leading actresses, Juliet Reno and Dominique Labourier. Like Other games, it is most rewarding for the Players, leaving the spectators to get whatever satisfaction they can from watching. The satisfaction here was not enough to sustain a length of over three hours. Improvisation, on which Rivette relies heavily, always seems to militate against coinpactness, although it accords well with the notion of the film as a game.
One aspect of the game is that favourite New Wave pastime of deploying references, Which is pursued with a keenness unequalled since Jean-Luc Godard's Made in USA. It is difficult to know whether the references are meant to annex areas of meaning outside the h. 1m or whether they are no more than in Jokes. Are we to take Celine's name just as an allusion to the author of Voyage an bout de la nuit or are we meant to be extra smart and remember the Madame Celine who appeared in a couple of Godard movies? Add Celine's surnames, Cendrars, and you have 0Pened further fields for exploration. I suspect that it would be equally unrewarding to treat Celine and Julie simply as a conundrum to be sorted out, a matter of establishing a pattern into which everything would fit. Rivette, however, clearly signals that this is not what he wants us to do by b. locking off many of the more obvious Interpretations with some inconsistency. One cannot go very far in describing the action without coming unstuck. There are two girls, Celine, a magician, 'Ind Julie, a librarian. There is also a house, ! his rue du Nadir aux Pommes, which may nlve the memory of one or both of them. !heir visits to the house leave them dazed :nd without memory but still sucking a weel which can later be used again to recall
melodramatic goings-on within the house. They take it in turns to go back and then to use the sweet to tune in to various segments of the same action. The other participants play their parts without variation but our two heroines are interchangeable in the part of a nurse looking after the young girl in the melodrama. By repeated visits to 7 bis and other magic, they work out that the girl is in danger of being murdered, so they go in together to save her.
The best clue to Rivette's intentions comes from his previous work which has repeatedly involved the world of the theatre and the idea of performance. The fact that the action in 7 bis seems to start at the same time each day suggests the idea of a job rather than a dream or a fantasy. The opening scene, in which Julie follows Celine around Paris is prefaced by a title saying, 'Most of the time, it started like this,' which again suggests repetition, and the last sequence confirms this by starting to repeat the first but with Celine following Julie. Celine is herself a performer with her magic act ; at one point, when she is busy in 7 bis, Julie performs in her place (though her act is different and finally turns into a torrent of abuse at the audience). Their lives seem to be performances but there is an obvious contrast between their spontaneity and the predetermined script acted out by the denizens of 7 bis. There does seem to be some interest to be had in following Rivette's handling of themes in the area of reality and fantasy, performance and life, which grow out of the contrast. However, the foundation for such explorations has to be the extent to which the two girls come across as alive and interesting. In this, Rivette meets with almost total failure: Celine and Julie are not people but only actresses improvising, and the film is no more than an inconsequential investigation of its own nature.
It has not been a good week for the American cinema. Trackdown (London Pavilion, X certificate) is another vigilante movie with Jim Mitchum following his fugitive kid sister to the big city and dispensing the expected amount of rough justice. Weak-kneed suggestions that the girl might have been justified in leaving home and that the police force is doing its best in difficult circumstances are atoned for in a climax which has a lady social worker, the film's liberal character, joining in the fusillade.
Logan's Run (Empire, A certificate) is a science fiction movie which expends much effort on special effects including a battery of holograms but has few ideas that haven't been around several times before. Originality here comes in very small doses, for ex ample in replacing the discovery of a ruined New York, which was the intended high spot of the first two Planet of the Apes pictures, with the discovery of a ruined Washington with ivy trailed tastefully across the statue of Lincoln. There is an immutable rule that trips into the future deprive perfectly serviceable writers of the ability to produce dialogue. The victim this time is David Zelag Goodman who did such a good archaeological job with the Chandlerisms of Farewell My Lovely. Mouthing his leaden lines here we have Michael York and Jenny Agutter with heavy relief provided by Peter Ustinov as an old character. Yet again, science fiction emerges as the screen's deadest genre.
Ian Cameron, who has been contributing this column since April, will be succeeded next week by Clancy Sigal.
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