by Mark Murton
Original French Title: Céline et Julie vont en bateau: Phantom Ladies Over Paris
Directed by: Jacques Rivette
Cat Out of the Bag Alert! This review contains some spoilers for this film!
Synopsis: Julie (Dominique Labourier), a daydreaming librarian, meets magician Celine (Juliet Berto) in Montmartre and they wind up sharing the same flat, bed, fiancé, clothes, identity and imagination. Soon, thanks to some psychotropic sweets, they find themselves spectators, then participants, in a ‘film-within-the-film’ melodrama unfolding in a mysterious suburban house.
Kitty Cameos: The film opens with Julie sitting in the park reading a book on magic. Nearby a tabby and white cat is running along the benches then down onto the ground as it stalks some unseen prey.
It’s in the park that Julie first encounters Celine and starts to follow her through the Montmartre streets. Along the way she passes a cat sitting on a high wall outside a house (possibly the same cat in the previous scene).
Later, the action starts to centre around 7 Bis, rue du Nadir-aux-Pommes, and as Julie approaches the house she is joined by a cat which briefly falls into step with her.
As she arrives at the house, what appears to be this same cat, a tortoiseshell, walks across the steps in front of her.
Julie rings the doorbell as tabby kitten sits in the shadows on the far left of the top step.
A little later, Julie goes back to the house where the kitten is still present on the top step. For some reason she seems to give the kitten a wide berth.
Julie and Celine eventually go to the house together and the same two cats are sitting on the left hand pillar at the top of the steps.
It’s not clear that there are two cats present until one jumps down from the pillar and the other drops to the top of the concrete handrail just below.
Unable to gain entry, Celine and Julie decide to sit on the top step and have a cigarette, and the tortoiseshell cat decides to sit on the step too.
Soon they do gain entry. Once inside a tabby kitten can be seen lying in a hallway.
Celine spies one of the female occupants, Camille (Bulle Ogier), searching through a trunk of clothes with this same tabby kitten at at her feet.
As Camille unpacks another dress, the kitten starts to play with the garment’s dangling belt.
At the end of the film Celine and Julie do indeed go boating while a calico cat naps nearby.
The calico shows up again as the final frame of the film.
Director Jacques Rivette was obviously a lover of cats and included them in many of his films.
Final Mewsings: Cats would rather go fishing than boating.
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