91Èȱ¬

The French title "Monter En Bateau" translates as to string someone along, and that's exactly what the filmmaker Rivette does to us with this freewheeling, semi-improvised extravaganza, which critics have come to regard as the final flowering of the French New Wave. Prepare to suspend your disbelief when watching Celine And Julie Go Boating, for the fantastical plotting has an Alice in Wonderland-style strangeness, with its two eponymous heroines gaining access to the ghostly goings-on at a mysterious Parisian mansion.

The librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier) and the magician Celine (the late Juliet Berto) meet in a Montmartre park one balmy summer, and swiftly develop an intense and almost telepathic friendship. Thanks to some magical pieces of candy, they are both able to remember their joint trips to the the shuttered residence at the wonderfully named Rue Du Nadir Des Pommes. And it's there they become caught up in a world whose spectral occupants appear to be playing out an endless tale of romance and murder.

"PLAYFUL INQUIRTY INTO FILMMAKING"

Shifting between the casual naturalism of Celine and Julie's endless pranks, japes and game-playing, and the stylized melodrama of the scenes in the haunted house, Rivette pays affectionate homage to numerous movie genres. A deeply whimsical tribute to the pleasures and powers of child-like imagination, Celine and Julie becomes a playful inquiry into filmwatching, with our heroines endlessly conjuring up and heading off into unexpected fictions. At 192 minutes this certainly has its more tedious moments, although the womens' reserves of curiosity remain miraculously intact: by the end they're ready to begin the whole process all over again.

In French with English subtitles.