A mysteriously linked pair of young women find their daily lives pre-empted by a strange boudoir melodrama that plays itself out in a hallucinatory parallel reality.
This 1974 film from French New Wave auteur Jacques Rivette is an epic masterwork of hallucinatory cinema. The two young women of the title meet, move in together, and soon become embroiled in a bizarre murder mystery and ghost story involving an ambiguous love triangle set in a mysterious Victorian mansion. This second story plays out as a film within the film, with Celine and Julie acting as its spectators -- who eventually step into the story in order to manipulate its ending. Rivette is concerned here with meta-levels of theater and cinema. In many ways, he's made a film that's actually about watching films. The performances have an off-the-cuff quality that contributes to the film's ragtag sense of fun.
The DVD transfer is appropriately rough -- a crucial part of Rivette's aesthetic -- but very nice. And the inclusion of two short films by other directors (Resnais' documentary about the Paris Library and RW Paul's wonderful silent "The Haunted Curiosity Shop") provides some welcome accompaniment to the main feature. There's also a critical feature that has some good insights into the film's themes and ideas, as well as shedding light on a few of the more puzzling moments in the film.
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French comedy drama in which two young women meet under an odd set of circumstances and discover that they are freakishly connected to each other. Somehow, Celine (Juliet Berto) and Julie (Dominique Labourier) keep stumbling into a kind of parallel reality with familiar surroundings, however they soon realise that they are no longer in the present day when they enter this other version of their world. After a young girl is murdered, the women realise that the sweets they keep finding in their mouths after arriving back into present day is the key to going back in time and saving her. But when the past is altered, will the future still be the same?
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