by Jacques Rivette, 1974.
Starring: Juliet Barto and Dominique Labourier.
Rating: 8.5/10, 9/10.
This is one of the more truly bizarre films that I’ve seen. I don’t know how good a job I could do of describing the plot, but I’ll try. Julie (Labourier) is a librarian who seems to have some sort of knowledge of the occult (the film opens with her reading an old-looking book about magic, and she is later seen reading tarot with a co-worker at the library), and Celine (Barto, who either looks an awful lot like Chrissy Hynde or just has the same hair) is a stage magician. As the film begins, they seem to be strangers who behave very oddly towards each other for a good hour, hour and a half, with Julie chasing Celine all over the city trying to return to her a boa (or maybe a scarf? I can’t remember) that she dropped as she ran past Julie. But the chase soon turns very, very odd indeed, with Julie playfully hiding from Celine. Eventually, the chase ends, though the next day (as one knows from the plate reading "But, the next morning..." that pops up onscreen) Julie finds Celine in a café and returns the items to her. Soon, though, Celine pops up sleeping outside of Julie’s apartment, looking rather beat up and on the run from someone or other. It turns out in good time (this film is quite long) that they are sisters, and Celine is running from the people she used to work for (as a maid, I think?) because she uncovered some sort of affair or odd business that was going on there, and now both women and the man are after her, together. So Julie goes to the house (I think it’s the same house), is let in by a door swinging open mysteriously, only to be violently ejected some hours later. She staggers to a waiting cab and goes home, where she is depressed over her lack of ability to remember what happened in the house. She pops a candy she’d had when she left the house back into her mouth and suddenly she remembers bits and fragments of an odd household arrangement that is much too hard to describe for me to even attempt to do it. At this point the film switches from a beautiful, if quiet, series of surrealistic images and scenes to an almost (almost) straightforward murder mystery/haunted house story, with Celine and Julie taking turns going to the house and popping the candy to remember, and try to figure out who did what in the house. I told you I didn’t think I could properly summarise it.
The whole thing is, surprisingly, very entertaining to watch (and often very funny), though I think I’d have to see it a few more times to understand everything, and I don’t know if my patience is up to it. Still, though, this film comes highly recommended from me. It’s one of those things where I have no idea what it all means, but it seems definitely to mean something, and somehow that’s enough. The opening scene alone is worth almost any price to see, and the movie has more memorable quotes than Bartlet’s ("I had to answer the call of nature. I’m not made of clover, you know").
nb: The picture here is in black and white, but the film is in colour.