Céline and Julie Go Boating

Hard for me not to read things in a feminist direction, and with this film I won't try. It's funny to me that most of the discussion around its themes centre on memory and storytelling. I think Rivette is only interested in the former as a function of the latter – how stories interact with our own memories and experience. But all of that ignores the central movement of the film: that of two women claiming agency of their lives and the stories they tell.

And they do this through each other. Céline impersonates Julie and disarms her childhood sweetheart, the conventions of romantic love and the pathologies of male desire. Julie returns the favour by impersonating Céline, calling out her exploitative employers at the cabaret and the pathological male desire it services. Both run away from the restrictive worlds of love and work, which they find boring and patronising.

And they are sucked into the drama of the haunted house, where two sisters pine for an unreachable widower (who rather than wiving one of them appears more interested in the housekeeper). These ghostly ladies revolve around the uncertain affections of a dour Byronic hero, and their mania will lead to the death of his young daughter. Céline and Julie, having saved each other, conspire to save the child from the restrictive story she is trapped in. They invade the narrative, making the ghostly ladies dull and ridiculous by comparison. And they end up escaping from it all, with the young girl joining their troupe.

Arguably, Rivette's focus on running away into the imagination is not a serious response to objectification, which eventually requires engagement with the worlds of love and work in order to end it. But the portrayal of Céline and Julie's solidarity – with each other and with all young girls caught up in other people's stories – mitigates that. Their irreverent example is practical up to a point. You need the space to reject the dominant narrative before you advance and change it. And 40 years on, this film definitely feels like part of that advance.

La Belle Noiseuse

I watched the four hours over two days (more films should have intermissions) and enjoyed almost every second. Exhaustive is probably the right word to use for this study of the creative process, in that there is no one process being depicted, no one reading you could apply to the characters and relationships presented. Instead the artist and model set-up serves as a springboard for multiple elliptical essays on the subject.

Unsurprisingly, the one that struck me most is the confrontation at the end of the first half. Frenhofer becomes dominating, forcing the (always naked) Marianne into increasingly twisted poses. He talks of breaking her bones, and there are uncomfortable sexual undertones coursing through his mania. But then he starts talking about her flesh as a portal to galaxies and black holes. He is attempting to stamp his authority not only on women's bodies but reality itself. Everything must become an object under the control of his paintbrush.

Marianne at one point recoils at being treated like a doll, but submits immediately afterwards and apologises. Why does she go through with it? Shortly after Frenhofer's existentialist rant, she laughs in his face, and he storms out. But she forces him to continue. The extraordinary beginning of the film (one of the best opening sequences I have watched) introduces her as a consummate mask-wearer. Maybe she's partly seduced by Frenhofer's talk of truth in art, a window into her self that she can't look through on her own. Or maybe as a writer she using him for material as much as he is using her. After all, the film begins and ends with her voiceover – she more than anyone is its author. Perhaps she is the trouble-maker, the nutcase, that spins everyone around her fingers for the diversion of a (foreign, ignorant) audience – just like the English tourists the film opens with.

But then it turns out the painting is a masterpiece. In Frenhofer's definition: it captures a lifetime in a single image. Frenhofer's wife Liz marks the back with a cross, and its composition does feel like a kind of crucifixion. And like Christ, it has to be walled up in a tomb. The idea of it emerges in wings of crimson from the blue nude Frenhofer fobs off to the public – streaks of blood cracking open the human shell. Just three characters (a trinity?) see the miracle unveiled, we only glimpse a bit of it. The Balzac short story the film is based on apparently haunted Cézanne and Picasso. Here it's Marianne more than anyone that haunts the film, denying us answers, but teasing us with the possibility of miracles.