From the beguiling opening when Celine dashes past Julie in a haste that recalls the famously tardy White Rabbit, the wild terrain of this film fairy tale invokes Lewis Carroll's classic. Rivette uses Carroll in one of his trademark, romping ruminations on the nature of film. Celine and Julie meet and become inseparable friends. Celine, a magician by trade, invites her new friend to visit the fantasy house she has invented. After their adventures in the house neither can remember a thing until they munch the obligatory candy. Once they do, though, they become spectators to their own fantastical travails inside the house. There they compete for a widower who vowed never to marry again and try to solve the mysterious suffocation of a little girl. They take turns playing the nurse as well as memorizing and forgetting their lines for the film within a film. Rivette has been praised as one of the true innovators of the French New Wave and proves it in this crazy contemplation of what story and film can be. "Jacques Rivette's powerful and ambitious movie is structured like a puzzle. Bits of fantasy occur at different times, and the girls must compare their separate experiences—all archetypes from childhood fairy tales—to piece together the whole magical enigma." (Time) Imported new 35mm print from the British Film Institute.
1974, color, 3 hours 13 minutes, France