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“Jacques Rivette calls Celine & Julie Go Boating a fun picture. But fun for whom? Not the audience. Rivette, one of the most talented of the original New Wave group in France, has degenerated in his recent work from disciplined, relevant statements of genuine humanistic interest to self-indulgent exercises that are intended solely to please himself and the people he works with. The rest of us can join the party only at the cost of being monumentally bored.”
And further: “Critic James Monaco has constructed a tortured argument to the effect that Rivette’s elongated narratives are necessary to get us into the artificiality of it all. But we don’t need over three hours to realize that Rivette is talking about fantasy here. . . . Rivette could provide his audiences with footnotes to his text, as Eliot did for The Wasteland. But Eliot had important things to say, and that makes the struggle to understand his arcane references worth something. . . . Rivette, by contrast, prides himself on his obscurity.”
