Céline e Julie vanno in barca

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.

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.

Last year, at a crisis time of imminent homelessness, I went to the video store with the idea of renting some banal new release to distract me from my troubles. Waiting in line holding a video starring Tom Hanks (or was it Kevin Costner? Maybe it was Julia Roberts. Such a blur is Hollywood today) something in the foreign section an aisle down caught my eye. It was the video for Jacques Rivette's 1974 masterpiece, Celine and Julie Go Boating.

Immediately upon seeing the cover image of Juliet Berto (Celine) posed as a magician, her Dietrich hauteur kinky and comical, I knew it would be my kind of film. I was also pleased to see it was such a long film it had to be contained in a two-video set. It had long been my suspicion that all secrets of life would be revealed in a film over three hours long and in French.

Indeed, Celine and Julie is just that film. But it conceals as it reveals, which is to say that its great mysteriousness results from its floribundance of revelation. Yes, my friend, a floribundance! I never even thought of such a word until seeing Celine and Julie.

Critics have been unable to explain what it's "about". I cannot. I can't explain the plays of Shakespeare or the poems of Emily Dickinson, but I am moved by them. Attempts to understand them can lead to intense mental spasmodics, but the pain, if the work is good, can be great.

Those who've seen the film will remember the hard magic candy the women savored on their own path to understanding. Vision giving, the candy became an addiction to them. Once is never enough and hasn't been for me. I have seen Celine and Julie three times and thought of it many more.

My favorite scene is where Celine performs her weird magic act in a nightclub where, as far as I can tell, the customers are all convicted poets. The atmosphere there is fascinating. Time stops while she does her act, which is beyond words, indescribable. The whole feeling in that scene of a kind of super sophisticated moment of comedy and sex and mystery all shared by a group of people in silence is one that I find marvelously inspiring. Surely some clever entrepreneur in San Francisco, where I reside, could open such a club. Oh, I suppose it won't happen, but at least one can dream.

Really, it's the importance, power and pleasure-pain of dreaming that this film reawakended me to when I saw it months ago. To be like Celine and Julie with their minds moved by candy is a state I aspire to daily.

When I was briefly without a place to live, I thought of this film and was taken to a sunny day in Montmarte, a house where the living and unliving mingle, a library where stalkers and smokers meet. I savored that magic, the effect of great art on the mind, and I knew I was not truly homeless.

Some directors use less than 2% of their footage in the final cut but Rivette must have used 92% of his to make this - perhaps he used absolutely everything, including, apparently, out-takes. Tedium sometimes has a point, but not here. This is annoying-tedium for every scene seems calculated to test our patience. There's no humour or verve or flair or great lines or classic scenes, not even sad attempts at those things, only a forced drollerie that falls flat in every scene There is endless silly giggling, scenes such as those in the nightclub that are just tiresome to watch, fantasy sequences that are presumably meant to look like a corny TV sitcom, but, lacking any scrap of humour, the point is entirely lost and the actors flounder. The girls try far too hard to be cute, and only succeed in being cloying. And I'm waiting for a director to grasp this simple truth: that giving the actors free rein does not make the action more spontaneous and natural, only more strangulated, more self-conscious, more unnatural and cringe-inducing than if they were following a consistent and meticulous script.

After a while you realise Rivette is just playing silly buggers. Fluffed lines are left in, characters glance inadvertently-deliberately at the camera. Rivette will be saying: 'Regard, c'est un film that is pas un film, we're deliberatement toying avec your illusions'. I'm saying: Vous etes un wankeur.

Why three hours? A Senses of Cinema article is eager to explain: 'The tradition of rigid adherence to the 90 minute to 2-hour time frame, enforced by the laws of free market capitalism, is exploded by Rivette. As a filmmaker, Rivette refuses to confine himself to these arbitrary lengths, or to the even more arbitrary, if unspoken, rules about demands on subject matter and mise-en-scène in films of epic length. Instead, Rivette extends the lengths of his films to a point beyond necessity, where it is understood that the film's length in and of itself is a statement about the system he works in and rebels against.' 3 hours simply to defy (capitalistic??) convention? Wankeur.

The audience are the dupes here - poked fun at for trying to apply reality to what is self-consciously only a film. This is not New Wave. I'm gazetting Rivette as a hanger-on, a copyist. He wants to shoot in the style of Rohmer, but he hasn't got Rohmer's indefinable deftness. He wants to break the rules like Godard but he has not got Godard's indefinable style or charisma. He wants to say something meaningful in an offhand way, like Truffaut, but he hasn't got that indefinable intellect for it. All he can do is try. You can feel him trying. It boils down to a single lame joke that isn't funny and a single idea that isn't clever. Three hours of film-flam, tiresome beyond belief.

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.