Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 111: Sun Apr 21

Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette, 1974): Barbican Cinema, 3pm
To celebrate 100 years of the Critics’ Circle, the oldest organisation of its kind in the world, the Barbican are screening the series The Film That Changed My Life. Tonight's movies is introduced by Independent on Sunday film critic Jonathan Romney.

Chicago Reader review:
Jacques Rivette's comic feminist extravaganza is as scary and unsettling in its narrative high jinks as it is exhilarating in its uninhibited slapstick (1974). Its slow, sensual beginning stages a meeting between a librarian (Dominique Labourier) and a nightclub magician (Juliet Berto). Eventually, a plot within a plot magically takes shape—a somewhat sexist Victorian melodrama with Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder (the film's producer), and a little girl—as each character, on successive days, visits an old dark house and the same events take place. The elaborate Hitchcockian doublings are so beautifully worked out that this movie steadily grows in resonance and power. The four main actresses scripted their own dialogue with Eduardo de Gregorio and Rivette, and the film derives many of its euphoric effects from a wholesale ransacking of the cinema of pleasure (cartoons, musicals, thrillers, and serials).
Jonathan Rosenabum

There's pretty much nothing like this.

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