Céline and Julie go boating (1974)

Having seen some of Jacques Rivette's crime stories, Céline and Julie go boating was something completely different. For the first twenty minutes, we see one girl chasing another, or is she chasing her, what is she doing? The quiet, strange scene sets the tone for the rest of the film, a whimsical, weird affair a librarian bewitched by magic and a nightclub magician who performs her tricks in a seedy club. I must confess that after 1 hour, I just felt confused. After 3 hours and 5 minutes, I had been dragged into the world of the two leading characters, Céline and Julie, who after the longish initial scene became friends. Because this is what the film at least partly seems to be about: creating a world of one's own. With Julie and Celine, we enter a mysterious house, and with them, we have mysterious amnesia afterwards. They finally 'remeber', or wait, they 'make up', or wait, they 'hallucinate', or what, they 'imagine' what goes on in the house. The second part of the film is made up by a film-within-the-film, a melodramatic story about jealousy and murders! We see Rivette smiling somewhere behind the scenes; a film about acting, pretending, playing... Oh, what a French movie this is, and not in a bad way particularly - but a chronically academic and complex one - deconstruction, baby. Julie and Céline (re)enact film as fantasy, play and nightmare at the same time - somewhere between reality, dream and the land of ghosts. Freud himself would probably have cheered enthusiastically had he seen this movie. But of course, when I said this film is academic I didn't intend to say it is dry: no, the opposite is rather the case. This, if anything, is whimsy. But what is real and what is not and who are the ghosts? You guessed it: the answer is a messy one.

Once every now and then I hade the feeling that David Lynch must have taken a cue from this while making Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire - there are several Lynchian themes here.  

Afterwards, I thought about the way Celine and Julie portrays friendship. The image is just so familiar: two girls who form a friendship so strong and affective that their personalities starts to blur; two girls with a friendship that locks the external world out, creating a world of its own. Can you remember one single film about dudes that develops these traits?