An oddly surreal look at female relationships and feminine fantasies. This is a cinematic progenitor for a film like Susan SEIDELMAN's Desperately Seeking Susan. One character is a bored librarian, the other a magician. The former sees the latter as a model of feminine freedom and independence that she aspires to herself but lacks the psychological wherewithal to purchase. This is a tale of a free spirit and a repressive who enter their own wonderland that is strangely like our own.
This is not so much a shaggy dog story, in itself, as a shaggy dog story about monumental shaggy dog stories. Emphatic actresses, Julie BERTO (Céline) and Dominique LABOURIER (Julie) cleverly perform this with a great deal of structured ad libbing. The girls are adorable and their obvious chemistry works to the great advantage of the film. This is the superior flip side to John CASSAVETES Husbands, in mutual female admiration never coming more mutual and more admiring.
One is clearly forced to take a lot of the tale on trust in the absence of any evidence as to the veracity of what's on offer since both characters possess magic sweets that, when sucked, transport them elsewhere. But this "elsewhere" is just like real life and thus becomes a disquisition on the reliability of memory, especially regarding sensitive emotional issues, because their "elsewhere" seems to be what actually happened to them. Spiritual twins, the two girls briefly swap roles to better understand one another as well as live out their dreams.
This is also a film about the act of watching films. We are constantly reminded we are watching by the sheer length of the film as well as the often-stilted acting. And the film the two girls are intermittently watching places them alongside us as an integral part of the audience we are. The too many repetitive scenes before the mystery is finally solved spoil what could have been a masterpiece but, like all the best surrealism, this dream is firmly rooted in reality.
Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
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