10 Movies To Challenge Even The Most Hardcore Film Buff

3. Celine And Julie Go Boating

Magic and mystery permeate Celine and Julie Go Boating, a mesmerising film by the great French New Wave director Jacques Rivette weighing in at over three hours long, in which the titular friends exchange identities, learn magic spells, explore the underbelly of Paris and, of course, go boating. The radiant Dominique Labourier and Juliet Berto star as the two young women who meet up in a Parisian park and decide to move in together. The two play one another's roles in various circumstances, with Celine meeting Julie's childhood sweetheart and Julie filling in at a cabaret audition. As the house in which they live starts to exhibit increasingly strange and magical properties, they set out to attempt to unravel its mysteries. Memory and identity again play a central thematic role in Celine and Julie Go Boating, a film which is as much a meta-analysis of the form and function of cinema itself as it is a portrayal of the magical and numinous. Influenced by both Lewis Carroll and Marcel Proust (who's novel In Search of Lost Time deconstructed the nature of memory to its finest details), Rivette's movie is a glorious free-wheeling affair with entrancing central performances and a spirited disregard for the formal rules of filmmaking.