Celine and Julie Go Boating

Praised by the critics as "delicate , mysterious, and exiting", "an original and entertaining metaphor for film-watching and, perhaps, film history", and named "The most radical and delightful narrative film since Citizen Kane! The experience of a lifetime" by New York's critic David Thompson, "Celine and Julie Go Boating" (1974) is all of the above but first of all it is incredible fun to watch. This magic candy of a movie tells the story (or rather plays with the story) of two friends, Julie, a librarian and Celine, a magician. The film starts one sunny summer day in Paris when Julie follows running through the park and losing her stuff all over (a scarf, a shoe…) Celine exactly like another girl in the English country side one sunny summer day had followed a White Rabbit into a world of her imagination. Two girls became friends and soon with the help of a magic memory-inducing candy, they both will be the observers and participants in a bizarre soap-opera like drama that takes place in a mysterious house. It involves two stunningly beautiful women, a blonde and a brunette, who are in love with the same man. The man is a widower with a young daughter who had promised his wife that he would not remarry as long as their daughter is alive. When the blonde and the brunette become desperate enough to try to do something about the situation, it is up to Julie and Celine to come up with the plan and to rescue the young girl. Will they go boating? Well, you will have to stay with them for all 193 minutes to find out. Yes, Rivette takes his time but his movie never seems slow or boring. Playful yet complicated, mad and funny, "Celine and Julie" is a magic movie. It grabbed me from the opening scene - which is of course the opening chapter of "Alice in Wonderland" - and it never let go. Buniel would love this movie, I think. It also reminds me of "Mullholand Dr" and even "Persona" but in the absolutely different mode. Simply DELIGHTFUL.

I saw "Céline et Julie vont en bateau" a few years after watching "3 Women" and Claudia Weill's "Girlfriends." The next day I saw it again, and then again and again... This was a time when I was very interested in the depiction of modern women in films: some were quite original and revealing, and this was indeed one of them, dealing with the creative process, and women's imagination. Made in 1974, it had a similar origin as that of "3 Women", in which the female cast (Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, and Marie-France Pisier) worked with director Rivette and writer Eduardo de Gregorio on the script. It is also a story of female bonding and solidarity, but instead of relying on dreams, it uses magic and literary sources, Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" being the first to come to mind. Librarian Julie (Labourier) becomes intrigued by weird rabbit-like magician Céline (Berto), but soon one is after the other. They become friends (or sort of) and exchange roles in each other's life, but nobody seems to notice the difference. Then Céline reveals she frequently goes inside an old house where a melodrama is repeated on and on (based on Henry James' "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes" and "The Other House"), enacted by two women (Ogier, Pisier) who are both in love with a very pale man (filmmaker Barbet Schroeder.) In the old house there is also a little girl (Nathalie Asnar) who is in danger, so Céline and Julie become the "phantom ladies" of the title (including Fantômas outfits) to rescue her. This post-modern movie is a puzzle, and the audience is intellectually involved in the making. Critics went crazy and called it "the most important film made since 'Citizen Kane'." I don't know if it is, but I love it: it is funny, demanding, entertaining, and sometimes boring, in the best tradition of Satie's repetitive "Vexations". Reworked as "Desperately Seeking Susan", without acknowledging it.

When I first saw this film I was amazed by it. The freshness and the imagination of the two protagonists, the way in which it recognised the magic (real magic) of Paris, and the strange parallel worlds it created in which Celine and Julie are both deeply involved and creating, and then acting, their own parts. On re-viewing it more than ten years later though, I was surprised to be a little disappointed. The magic is so thin. Celine and Julie have taken the, very conscious and explicit, decision not to grow up, and as a result, although they are beautiful adults, their world is a child's world. Their imagination is child-like, in its imagery (sweets, plastic "dinosaur eyes", rather thin puns), in its chosen surroundings (cases full of dolls), its disasters (a grazed knee), its aims (largely disruption of the concerns of surrounding adults), in its ridiculing of sexuality and its steadfast refusal to admit that fantasy is sometimes, necessarily, dangerous. Without any danger or any desperation, it seemed on second visit a charming but slightly futile game.

As a teenager in the 1970s, I was a frequent visitor to an art gallery in Liverpool called the Open Eye. When they started a film club, promising to show all the stuff I had read about but would never otherwise get a chance to see, I signed up like a flash.

It was a humble affair: a bare room with temporary blackouts on the windows, a makeshift screen at one end, a projector at t'other and a dozen or so ill-assorted chairs inbetween, but I loved it. For me it was a magic grotto: a portal to another place of endless fascination and discovery. It was here that I had my first exposure to the works of Buñuel, Renoir, Fritz Lang; Dziga Vertov's "Man With a Movie Camera"; the experimental shadowgraph animations of Man Ray; David Lynch's Eraserhead – and, unforgettably, "Céline et Julie vont en bateau".

Even for one as keen on "Art" cinema as I was, Céline et Julie was a bit of a challenging prospect: a low-budget French thing about god-knows-what, by a director I'd never heard of, that we were warned would run over three hours without interval. Little did I know, as the opening credits rolled, that from then on time would mean nothing and I would be held captive; enthralled; the hours slipping by unheeded, as when dreaming.

It is this quality that, for me, makes this film so special. European (especially French) cinema is full of works that lay claim to the label "Surrealist". I have to say that in my opinion most of them have little to do with the truly surreal at all. More often than not they are simply a cocktail of absurdism and social satire.

Céline et Julie, on the other hand, is a genuinely surreal film – possibly the ONLY genuinely surreal film ever made (!) - insomuch that its narrative (and hence the experience of watching it unfold) is uncannily dreamlike. From the outset the viewer is drawn inexorably forward by a teasing sense of curiosity. Frequently along the way there seems to be far too much going on that is unexplained, and little hope of fitting it all together, yet one cannot help but remain in the story. In time, we become aware that our mixed sensations as viewer are mirroring those being experienced by Céline and Julie – and thus we find ourselves in that familiar condition of the dreamer: of being simultaneously both onlooker and protagonist in our own drama.

Afterwards, I was left feeling curiously elated, yet struggling to recall its details with any precision. The impressions it had left behind were powerful and thought-provoking, yet intangible, and recalled but imperfectly, in the manner of one who has just awoken: with a frustrating uncertainty as to exactly what had occurred, to whom and in what order. Any attempt to explain it to a third party was equally doomed. Just as with a half-remembered dream, the very act of telling caused the peculiar para-logic of the narrative to disintegrate, and I'd be left speechless.

It's been part of me ever since. Over the last 30-odd years, the themes and images of this film have, in the nicest possible way, haunted me: lurking in the shadows of consciousness, beyond the clumsy reach of rational query, quietly informing my imagination, to appear, unbidden, in subtle and unexpected ways in my own creative output.

The whole strange business has been made all the more uncanny by the fact that, throughout those 30-odd years, the film itself has been lost to me. Having experienced it the once, I was never able to find Céline et Julie again, nor any reference to it, even in the pages of famously trusted and supposedly 'comprehensive' movie guides. Likewise, whenever I mentioned the film in conversation I could never come across anyone who had ever heard of it. Having worked its mischief, the contrary creature had melted back into the half-light, leaving no trace of its existence.

Then, in October of 2006, a miracle: there it was, right in front of me, listed in the TV schedules! Film4 was showing it – at the suitably unconscious hour of 3am. Unwilling to risk losing it for another 30 years to the vagaries of my video recorder's dodgy timer, I sat up, my finger hovering nervously over the Record button...

A few days later, having found an afternoon in which we were free of commitments, my partner and I settled in to watch it: she with some scepticism that she would be able to maintain her interest for the whole 3 hours, and me both a-quiver with anticipation and privately praying that, in the hard light of reality, this thing of treasured half-memory would not prove itself to be The Worst Load Of Pretentious Tripe Ever Made.

I needn't have worried. No sooner had I hit "Play" than that fragrant, familiar magic began weaving itself all over again. I am delighted to report that Céline et Julie is just as powerful an experience now as it was in my youth.

What I had forgotten, or perhaps never noticed at all on first viewing, was just what a rough-edged, homespun creature it is in technical terms. It was shot entirely on location, on 16mm and with a very small crew, and it shows. The soundtrack is patchy in places and frequently prey to whatever ambient sounds were present when the camera rolled (usually Parisian traffic noise). Now and then the acting is self-conscious, and some of the reaction shots are clumsily done. In the end, though, none of this matters a damn. Indeed, it is the film's very lack of studio polish that gives it much of its special flavour. Céline et Julie is an imperfect creation, but an honest one. It is also charming, playful and frequently hilarious. As such, I recommend it unreservedly.

Julie is a quiet and quite shy librarian who is in the park reading her book when a sort of white rabbit runs by in a hurry – dropping stuff as she goes. Julie follows the girl to return her glasses etc but loses her, only for the girl (Celine) to turn up at Julie's workplace and put their two lives together. Julie discovers that Celine has been visiting a mysterious house during the day but leaving without a memory of what happened to her in there, so she decides to visit it as well – only for the same to happen to her. The pair try to remember what they have gone through and gradually piece together that the house is trapped in a ghostly loop of the day a young girl was killed.

This plot summary is perhaps a bit flattering to the film because it does suggest that this is a tight little mystery with an element of magic and the supernatural to it, however nothing could really be further from the truth. As others have said this film is not really so much about what it seems, but few reviewers here have been able to shed much light on what it is actually about, with the majority just gushing about what a wonderful experience it is. I do concede that watching the film is an experience because it is very different from a lot of stuff I have seen before, but that does not necessarily read that it is brilliant as a result. I know there are things here that I am missing and I'm sure I'm being a total philistine, but it does seem that some people (particularly those who can barely stretch their love of the film to longer than a few lines of text) seem to be falling over themselves to praise a French art film for being, well, French and arty.

It was difficult for me to get through, I'll be honest, because it is very long by anyone standards. The first hour seems to be mostly silent and very, very little happens. Later in the film we do get more into the mystery of the house but even this is stretched to the point where it is hard to really care. Rivette has directed with a nice hand, using edits and atmosphere to produce a sense of wonder where really there isn't one. It does seem like his way of letting his cast explore has helped produce some of this natural air of imagination but I did wish that someone had maybe suggested to him that he reign it in to some degree but I guess nobody did (although seeing some of his other work, maybe this is him in total control!). The overall theme of childhood and imagination within this Alice in Wonderland rip is OK to discuss and think about but it is nowhere near interesting or clever enough to justify the long running time given to it here.

The cast do well to improvise and both Berto and Labourier have bought into the material well, producing the imaginative wonder and lack of restraint that the material needed – it never seems like they are questioning anything they are presented with, which is pretty important with all the crossing of identities etc. Outside of them though there really isn't anyone else as the "ghosts" are mostly quite stagy and unconvincing.

Overall then an interesting film on paper but a frantically difficult one in reality. I'm sure many viewers will fall for its meandering scenes and imaginative subtexts but for me personally I found myself "getting it" quite quickly but then still forced to watch the scenes as they drag on. Call me a philistine if you wish, but I didn't really see what all the fuss was about and didn't find the heart of the film to reach me as it appears to have done with other viewers. Have a go by all means but please see it for yourselves and don't let the critical hype tell you what you "should" see.