Céline and Julie Go Boating

Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau, 1974) is Jacques Rivette's playful French fantasy, and you can watch online on iFILM. It opens with a librarian named Julie chasing a clumsy, red-haired magician named Céline through a Paris park — a pursuit that turns two strangers into inseparable, reality-bending friends.

The pair start mirroring each other's lives. Whenever one of them swallows a piece of odd candy, she's pulled into a creaky old house where the same melodrama loops endlessly: someone is plotting to murder a little girl. At first Céline and Julie come back with only scraps of memory and laugh it off. Then they decide to stop watching and break into the story themselves, determined to rewrite its ending and save the child. Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier make the duo feel like two friends inventing a tall tale as they go.

Rivette runs past the three-hour mark and treats cinema as a game of memory, performance and female imagination — slow, silly and hypnotic at once. Critics and filmmakers from Susan Sontag onward have adored it, and you can trace its DNA all the way to Mulholland Drive. Come for the puzzle, not for a tidy resolution; this is an invitation to play. Stream Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) online on iFILM.