Celine et Julie vont en Bateau (1974)
Or Celine and Julie Go Boating, in English. Celine and Julie is a french arthouse movie from the 1970's. In case I just lost you there, as far as those go, it's actually a surprisingly entertaining watch. Directed by New Wave icon Jaques Rivette, Celine and Julie is about the eponymous pair of young women, Julie works as a humble librarian and has an interest in occultism, Celine is an eccentric stage magician prone to making up tall tales. Julie comes across Celine during her lunchbreak, follows her, a friendship, or perhaps more, between them eventually blooms. Eventually, and this is where the more fantastical side of this story comes in, both are drawn to a mysterious house. They enter it, but leave it with no memory of what happened in it, but a bonbon in their mouth that they can use to relive these memories. Soon it turns out that in the house, a timeloop of a family drama plays out daily that ends with a little girl dying. The two women resolve to safer her from this fate by styling a book of magic, brewing a magical potion and trying to break the cycle playing out inside the house. Eventually they do, also, actually go boating, for the record.
It's about as meta and confusing as it sounds, but it's presented in a surprisingly light hearted and playful manner. A lot of it owed to the charm of its two leads, supposedly close friends in real life, who treat their post modernist voyage mostly as an amusing adventure that they embark on with mischievous, childlike glee. In a way, Celine and Julie feels like a french surrealist take on a buddy comedy, contrasting the sometimes borderline cartoony hijinks the main characters get up to with the stiff, soap opera style drama that plays out inside the haunted house. "It smell like mothballs", quips Julie as they relive the memory through the power of magical bonbons like a pair of friends on a sofa riffing on a mediocre television show.
For the product of an era and a genre of film making that's generally assumed to be elitist and impenetrable, the movies is not exactly obtuse about what it's trying to do here, having a pair of free spirited young lesbians meddle with the narrative of a constantly repeating old melodrama about a stuffy rich family and resolving to liberate a young girl from it.
There's just a general joi de vivre to the whole production, not only is the dialogue mostly quite comedic (A lot of it, unfortunately, based on wordplay that doesn't translate very well from french), it also has a very sunny an colourful look to it. Celine and Julie's Montmarte is a place of blue skies, blooming flowers and stray cats. A sunny wonderland of continental european quaintness lending a fairy tale like whimsy to the entire film. Lewis Caroll is referenced multiple times. Add to that some very playful editing, like the running joke of the phrase "But, on the next morning" showing up multiple times.
In a lot of ways, Celine and Julie feels like it could be a sort of comedic companion piece to something like Mulholland Drive, as big on postmodernist undertones and layered mysteries, but presenting them as a playful buddy comedy, soaked in the warm sunlight of spring and the scent of blooming flowers instead in the packaging of a paranoid noir thriller. It's full with amusing litlle segments, most of them tying into its themes of liberation, like Celine taking down Julie's sleazy childhood boyfriend, or Julie lashing out at a bunch of greedy managers trying to use her magic act to help secure business relations in the middle east.
It's a movie that's breaking conventions as much as it's a movie about breaking conventions, ushering in a more liberated style of telling stories and adapting them, resorting not to the Sturm und Drang of radical deconstruction but good natured humour and formal experimentation. Carried by a pair of incredibly likeable lead performances, Celine et Julie is the joyful, witchy lesbian buddy comedy about breaking free from the shackles of conventional storytelling you never knew you needed. I'm well aware that a three hour long french new wave experimental movie is, generally speaking, not the easiest sell but I get the impression that even people outside of the hardcore arthouse crowd would be able to get some enjoyment out of it.
