Céline et Julie vont en bateau goes absolutely nowhere and takes 3 hours to get there.

If any movie has a claim to approaching the style of French Nouveau Roman, it's Jacques Rivette's Céline et Julie vont en bateau, a loopy rule-breaking quantum comedy in which the two heroines don't do much boating at all. Knowing a couple of expressions using the French word for boat, "bateau", may be in order. For starters, "monter un bateau" (to build a boat) means concocting a tall tale, which this movie definitely is (Céline is a pathological liar), while "aller en bateau" (taking a boat ride) means getting caught up in a story you're being told, which is how the two women get involved in a hoary melodrama/haunting thanks to Proustian editing and hallucinogenic candy. And then there's the one about being in the same boat (an expression that translates one-for-one in French), which justifies the motif of interchangeability that permeates the film. Though Céline and Julie are completely different characters, they are able to take each other's places in the haunted house's play (13 knocks, everyone!), but also in each other's lives (where Dominique Labourier has a career moment). Alchemical word play is also part of the game, as are the strange commonalities between the two women and the characters of the house. At more than 3 hours, in large part because scenes repeat with only slight additions several times, I thought I would get bored or frustrated with Rivette faffing about with movie logic, but no, it all definitely pays off in a wonderfully strange way.

Playful, surreal, and very, very funny. Makes a great comedy/tragedy pair with "Mulholland Drive."