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Far Out Magazine, 2025
Despite sparking from quiet beginnings, Jacques Rivette’s 1977 film Céline and Julie Go Boating slowly evolves into an absurdist odyssey that completely shatters the medium of film, following a gleefully chaotic collection of vignettes as the characters flit between narratives and, more interestingly, the prescribed roles for women in film.
It all starts with a trip down the rabbit hole, with the aforementioned duo meeting serendipitously after Celine drops her sunglasses on the street, leading to a cat-and-mouse interaction between them as Celine playfully evades Julie as she tries to return her dropped glasses, embarking on a crazed goose chase through Paris as they relish in the child-like joy of this unspoken game. After their paths finally merge, it is even less sensical than their first meeting, with an immediate and inexplainable connection that leads them to move in together and merge lives entirely.
It is perhaps Jacques Rivette’s most experimental film to date, with the director exploring the instantaneous bond of womanhood and its historically limited portrayal by leading the audience on a surrealist journey that sparks from their meeting. After becoming fast friends, Celine and Julie re-enact the limited roles available for women before gleefully destroying them, redefining the medium of film through a swirling collection of distorted sketches and scenarios, often breaking the fourth wall as the women make a spectator out of the audience, almost mocking us for enjoying stories that are bland in comparison to their devilish reimaginings.
Céline and Julie Go Boating never lies still enough for the dust to settle, with the characters initially observing the many stereotypes that have defined women’s presence in cinema before taking an axe to tradition and rewriting these colourless roles. They role-play nurses, mistresses and damsels in distress before deliberately straying from our expectations to wreak havoc on screen. Both women become interchangeable as they merge into a blob of the docile perception of femininity under the male gaze, wickedly enacting revenge on the men who have delegated them to such one-dimensional roles through a series of harmless tricks and pranks. Through their resistance to being turned into pleasurable spectacles or objects, Céline and Julie rewrite the dull narratives to embody an ever-changing and endless list of possibilities, becoming indefinable and liberated through their occupation and destruction of each reductive label.
Rivette creates a cinematic world that is free of boundaries by rooting itself in an eternal state of play and reinvention, with the structure becoming a living, breathing organism that moves with both women. It expands as they do, with their pursuit of expressive freedom being reflected in the free-flowing narrative, with Rivette seemingly bending to the strength of their will and creating something that appears unplanned and completely spontaneous, with no clearly imposed framework that might disrupt their creative instincts.
However, while Céline and Julie Go Boating appears to be the first of its kind in the ‘down the patriarchal rabbit hole’ genre of cinema, there have been some notable recent instalments in the world of feminist odysseys. Sean Price Williams, who was previously the cinematographer for the Safdie brothers, made his directorial debut with the 2023 film The Sweet East.
The film follows a high school student named Lillian as she breaks away from a school trip and embarks on a solo adventure along the Eastern Seaboard, coming across some rather strange characters along the way. While the movie is described as a satire of America’s political landscape, it naturally evolved in meaning due to being told through the perspective of a young woman, lending itself to a different analysis that reflects a similar thematic journey to Céline and Julie Go Boating.
Much like the quest of Céline and Julie, Lillian embarks on a journey that highlights the many different ways she is perceived by men, somewhat impervious to the dangers of her journey and nonchalant about the threat some of these men pose. Perhaps this is because of the dream-like element to the story, leading us to assume that this could be the type of film that ends with a ‘and then I woke up’ moment. But despite the ensuing chaos, Lillian remains coolly detached from this uncertainty, unsure of where she’s going but allowing herself to wander and be amused by each situation.
Her journey is marked by the many delusional men she meets along the way, with each of them imposing their own perception of women, whether it be Simon Rex’s character who sees her as a virgin Mary archetype, simultaneously wanting to protect and sleep with her, or the hyper-conservative farmers who view women as little more than possessions. However, while many of these characters represent real-life archetypes of men that women are all too familiar with, the darkness of the underlying story is subverted, akin to Céline and Julie Go Boating. This is seen in Lillian’s indifference to their impassioned misogynistic speeches and patronising words, never dealing with the repercussions we’d expect in real-life and instead drifting on to the next scene, never staying long enough to be affected and always escaping completely unscathed and in control.
While Céline and Julie Go Boating was a playful destruction of these stereotypes, teasing the audience by refusing to ‘play the part’, The Sweet East feels subversive in its frank depiction of a woman who uses the stupidity of the men to her benefit and in turn, outsmarts them. She pretends to go along with the image they have prescribed to her, using their underestimation of her intelligence to hoodwink them into giving her exactly what she wants.
Perhaps this is a more modern reflection of our current response to misogyny, with many women choosing to lean into the ways they can profit from their own oppression. Whether it be the rise of sugar daddies or a side hustle where you sell pictures of your feet online, some are trying to flip male desire into a system that they can earn from, something along the lines of ‘ask not what you can do for the patriarchy, but what the patriarchy can do for you’.
But this also points towards a fairly pessimistic view of women’s liberation, essentially losing hope in the prospect of equality and instead resorting to ways in which we can live alongside it; that we will never be viewed on an even keel, and the best we can do is make a profit from these limited projections. Maybe feminists in the 1970s were more hopeful about the ways we could evolve, believing the world to be a limitless place that could accommodate all of our identities and ways of expression. But in The Sweet East, it proposes the idea that there is a ceiling to our dreams of liberation and equality, and perhaps all we can do is learn to recognise it; to learn how to convincingly play the damsel in distress, use it to the best of our advantage and escape the rabbit hole in one piece.