David Thomson's Top Ten Films: Céline and Julie Go Boating

A film you may want to walk out of - but only for a while

Two young women, Céline and Julie (Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier), a magician and a librarian, more propelled by hope than competence, meet in Paris. Oh yes, it is really a summery Paris, enchanting as ever, with other people strolling around. Yet you feel that these are the only two souls in the world – or that they are readers and the world is a book. They make an intense, childlike friendship (this is a movie about a child's vision), and yield gradually to some secret, shared purpose (as if it were warmth or love rising in their bodies).

There is this strange house, somewhere in the city and the world, and they have a mission there, even if they cannot quickly discern it. Is the house haunted? Aren't all houses? But is it also what you might want to call a movie house – not just the kind of very pregnant house one finds in films, but a theatre in which some intense, daft, yet beguiling melodrama is always playing, a potential tragedy that, somehow, Céline and Julie may solve, or rescue?

No, the house is not simply a screen. It's a place of real depth, palpable rooms, where ghostly characters are endlessly making their way towards the climax of their story – isn't it that way in all houses? But Céline and Julie can urge the story forward – with their attention, their desire, their wish to help, and their fruitful sucking on the small candies that energise the scenario. The phantoms do not see them any more than the characters in other movies ever notice us, the audience. But as time goes by, so their look shifts from the naturalistic 1974 colour until they are pale fire from an RKO black-and-white film noir from the 1940s.

And all the while the three adult ghosts in the story (Barbet Schroeder, Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier) move in on Madlyn, the little girl. Is she doomed, or is she the Alice, the Maisie, the Lolita even that Céline and Julie may save?

I have described the plot of this ravishing entertainment at more length than usual because this may be the movie you've least heard of, and because it may help to have the allegorical strategy of Jacques Rivette, the director, made clear at the outset. I know that this is my favourite of films because it is a rapture on how film and other fictions work. It is about the suspension of disbelief (in French, "go boating" has that approximate meaning – to go off on an imaginary trip). But seeing Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, I realised how more than 25 years earlier, Rivette had found a gentler, subtler way of comparing life and our suspicion of it (the pretending factor) than Tom Cruise can manage as he assembles the flash-ins of a pre-cognitive dream. The fantasy in Rivette's picture comes from Lewis Carroll, from the short stories of Henry James (the basis for the story inside the house), from Rivette's immense, encyclopedic reference to other films and fictions, and from the singular realisation that with film, the human organism and its cultures gained a mastery that reassesses reality as a series of games. Waiting for the end, and wondering if you can shift its direction, are the abiding passions in play – and the set-up for a sublime return to the child's state of experience. Among other things, Céline and Julie Go Boating arrives at the conclusion that adulthood, and all its load, are fallacies – it's no surprise that the austere Frenchman, Jacques Rivette, loved Howard Hawks (and His Girl Friday).

One other thing, Céline and Julie is 192 minutes, which is not just long, it is a hint towards eternity. The film could play for ever, and Rivette in the early Seventies was entranced by duration: the idea that film had no better clue to our existence than its mimicry of passing time. Of course, long films, films to last all day, films you could wander in and out of as you might go from one room of your house to another (Warhol cinema, if you like), is commercially derisive. No customer expects to wait that long – though 25 years later we suffer a business that cannot tell any story quickly. Céline and Julie often moves with startling speed; then it is as extended and idle as a summer evening. See it once; you will want to see it again, if only to enjoy the freedom of walking in and out – just as if it were a relationship, or a house somewhere in the city where a story (your story?) is unfolding.

We are in a game and all we can do is trust our desire against rules no one has thought to explain. Difficult? Madness? Bliss.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk