Jacques Rivette
1974
193 minutes
Okay, this one is fantastic. It's directed by Rivette, so it's going to clock in at well over three hours. But don't let that discourage you. Watch it in two chunks if you must. The first hour or so will just be the protagonists chasing each other down in an Alice in Wonderland-type homage, and then they'll bond and start making friends with each other, sometimes playing cheeky pranks. It's all amusing, but this can be a bit much to choke down at one sitting. If you're starting to get fatigued, watch it up to the point where they start taking an interest in a weird old house, because that's where it's really going to take off and get interesting.
The two weird girl friends start taking turns during their days Scooby-Doo exploring an apparently haunted house, but when they emerge from it they can't really remember much that happened and when they emerge they have mysterious candy lodged in their mouths. Eating the candy spurs some memories of what they saw inside the house. Apparently the house was the site of the murder of a young child, and the ghosts involved keep reliving the night of the murder over and over as if putting on a stage play for a usually non-existent audience. The girls keep revisiting, each time remembering a bit more, which is shown to the audience, and the murder mystery involving the ghosts starts to be revealed. Eventually the two women enter the house and discover that they can take part in the story and affect its narrative--which they do, in a rather hilarious manner. Then they celebrate by...going boating. And at the end the cycle of the two of them meeting mysteriously starts again.
This film is charmingly directed and charmingly acted and it passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. It hits all the right notes, between surreal comedy and straight-up spooky mystery horror. Is it longer than it could be? Sure. But movies now are easily pushing the three hour mark with much less to say or look at, so have no doubt that it is worth the running time.
The haunted house segments remind you a bit of some modern immersive theater works you've seen. In particular, before the pandemic you and your belated wife went to New York and to celebrate your anniversary got tickets for Sleep No More, an immersive retelling of Macbeth which was set in an old New York hotel repurposed as an enormous theater space. Spectators were given creepy masks to wear so that actors and other guests would identify them as guests. They were then given liberty to wander around the various floors of the hotel to discover the actors mostly silently re-enacting parts of the play taking place simultaneously throughout the building, with some occasional gentle guidance and herding. You could pick a character such as Lady Macbeth or Macduff and follow them during portions of the play from scene to scene to see what they were going to do next. There were lots of acrobatics, a titillating amount of nudity, and plenty of crowd-pleasing antics for spectators who knew the play well.
The interactive and improvisational nature of this made it desirable for spectators to attend multiple performances to make different choices and see what they had missed on previous visits. Or they could bring lots of friends so everyone could compare notes later about what they experienced on their own trips through the space. They let spectators know that there would be zero tolerance for any shenanigans--no talking or touching performers or creeping on other guests, and this rule seemed well-enforced. It was all pretty ingenious and made for a great bit of theater. This movie makes you want to go back and re-experience seeing this play.
Time to choose something different: