“A magician and a librarian, respectively, Céline and Julie are no strangers to the pleasures of fiction and make-believe. ‘Life is full of happy endings when you pretend,’ sings Jerry Lewis’s goofball aspiring children’s author in Frank Tashlin’s Artists and Models (1955), a film that Rivette and de Gregorio saw together in the summer of 1973. Céline appears at Julie’s library and bangs around in the kids’ section. ‘The children are very noisy today,’ a colleague of Julie’s observes. We see Céline tracing her hand in the pages of a large picture book, and Julie at her desk, mindlessly making thumbprints with an ink pad. There’s a humorous eccentricity to this behavior, but Rivette exalts these childlike tendencies as virtues, and as implicit disavowals of the strictures of masculine fantasy.”
— Beatrice Loayza on Céline and Julie Go Boating (via)