So this is the next new-to-me entry from the S&S 2022 list, at #78. (My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away are also new at #72 and #75, but I’ve seen them before.) I hadn’t really heard of this movie, and had no idea what to expect — kinda my naive thought, based just on the title, was that it would be some kind of fun thing where two women enjoy a summer day on the water, maybe like one part Daisies, one part “Partie de campagne,” and who knows what else.

And as it starts out, it feels like maybe that will be true. Julie is sitting on a park bench reading when Céline runs past in a hurry, and drops her sunglasses. Julie picks them up and chases after Céline, and this very extended chase sequence is light-hearted and playful, and doesn’t end with them meeting until the next morning.

And then from there, they meet up again, Céline ends up staying at Julie’s place, and they do some pranks where they go to each other’s jobs or meet up with each other’s dates and blow things up a bit. So okay, we’re like 90 minutes into a 3+ hour movie, and it seems like this will be the general shape of what we’re doing — feels like it might get kinda long for something so light, but hey.

But it turns out this was just essentially the introduction, and now with the preliminaries out of the way, the movie is ready to start its plot going. I’m going to put the rest of this behind spoiler protection, because revealing things at an appropriate pace is kinda the whole point of the movie.

Spoilers

So, when Céline first came to Julie’s house, she was confused and disoriented, with a skinned knee, and she talked about how the people at the house where she was nannying were going to be looking for her. Julie goes off for a playful identity swap to this house… and emerges at the end of the day, confused and disoriented. She stumbles into a taxi and gets home, with no memory at all of what she did all day, or how a bloody hand print got on her back.

But she did have a candy that was in her mouth when she got into the taxi, and when she tastes it again, it brings back some flashes of memory: Little scenes with characters we’ve never seen before, which (absent of any context) don’t make any sense to us. Céline is determined to go back to the house the next day; Julie is ready to pick her up at the end of the day, in case the disorientation thing happens again. It does, and after they’re home, Céline tastes her candy again and gets more flashes of memory — she’s remembering the same events as Julie did.

And so eventually they realize that this is a haunted house situation, where spirits are going through a loop of the same traumatic events every day. And then we proceed to the videogamey part of the movie, where they work to get more clues about what’s going on, repeating the loop a few more times to investigate other parts of the happenings. And then comes the final level, where they need to use their knowledge of the haunt to change things and prevent a tragedy from happening.

It gets tonally a lot darker here than during the first part of the movie, but at the same time, it is still the same movie: Céline and Julie bring the same impish, chaotic energy to fixing the haunt that they did to the events before that (down to even saying “ugh, this is boring, I’m falling asleep” as they’re reliving one part for the fourth time, which is a clever device that lets the movie skip over that part so the viewer doesn’t need to get bored).

This wasn’t at all what I expected, but it was instantly fascinating and got more interesting as it went on. Yeah, it’s longish (apparently a trademark of director Jacques Rivette — he also has two four-hour movies, a five-hour movie and a thirteen-hour movie, the latter of which I can’t imagine in a pre-home-video world) and oddly-paced, but the characters were compelling enough to keep the first half interesting, and once the plot does kick in halfway through, the movie’s pace is propulsive. Good stuff, which as usual doesn’t seem like a hot take considering this is literally on a list of great movies.