shewhomust | Mais, le lendemain matin...

I am happy to report that I have seen Céline et Julie vont en bateau again, after twenty-odd years, and I still love it. It's a long, slow film: three and a quarter hours is maybe not as exceptional now as it was in 1974, but that length results not from abundance of incident but from languid pacing. I am inclined to think that there is less to it than meets the eye, but only because the camera lingers so lovingly on each detail - Julie's pet fish, a Parisian street, a passing cat - that the best way to watch it is to sit back and surrender to the dream logic of the narrative.

Because, although I'd hate to spoiler this for anyone who hasn't seen the film, there is a narrative, and it is possible to read it in a realistic, logical way: Céline and Julie play a game to entertain Madlyn, and this is how it usually begins... The opening caption is revealed by the closing sequence to be the literal truth, which gives the narrative a satisfying shape, and offers a number of explanations - "oh, so that's why Céline and Julie are so good at double-guessing each other: the address of the mysterious house, the heart-shaped swimming pool..."

But the possibility of rational explanation doesn't spoil the mysterious twinship between them as it is revealed in the film, the bizarre courtship of the initial chase, and of Céline's appearance in the library where Julie works, their ability to step into each other's place, each impersonating the other to destroy a potential development (with Julie's childhood sweetheart, Céline's impresario) which her friend desires - or maybe, wants to sabotage. Inside the mysterious house, too, they share the rôle of nurse, and their duality echoes that of the two heroines of the melodrama (whom we first see reflected in a mirror).

It's a film which lends itself to the game of intellectual analyses: the patterns they perceive, the allusions they identify are not only undeniably present, but also surely deliberate: yes, there is a nod to Alice when the girl sitting lazily in the park is lured into pursuit - and into Wonderland - by someone who has dropped something, yes, the confection which dissolves on the tongue into a flood of memories is surely Proustian (though the name madeleine is transferred to the little girl, in the willfully altered spelling: Madlyn).

The important thing being that this is a game. What is going on in the house is an emotional melodrama, from which each of the girls in turn emerges shaken, traumatised to the point of amnesia. But they convert it into an old-fashioned movie which they can enjoy watching together, and which they can mock even as they are on the edge of their seats to find out what happens next. They get drunk on magical elixir, they forget their lines, they clown around the house with playground rituals - and they triumph. Mais, le lendemain matin...