Celine and Julie Go Boating

Levitt's "sacred work" is like fruit candy. In the first half of the movie, the saturated and bright tones bring out a fairy-tale sweet and sour taste. Celine and Julie are chasing and frolicking on the streets of Paris, and the camera moves playfully from different angles, even the ambient sound is full of playfulness. They act like improvisations in the apartment, library and other scenes, full of grotesque comedy attraction. The exchange of identities, mutual understanding, several casual play, teasing the old and conservative of narratives such as song and dance, love, suspense, etc., are embellished with the style of documentary. The joy of this narrative cannot be accomplished by sex. In Levitt's film world, conventional desire is not where the stimulus lies. The real stimulus lies in the distance from desire. "The Unruly Beauty" (1991), the artist sealed the painting in the wall, so the end of desire was cancelled. The game between Celine and Julie will not stop, you chase me, and your relationship with me is infinite because of ambiguity.

Levitt hides the subversion in candy. Not only does it subvert the traditional Hollywood narrative, but it also overturns the barriers of fairy tales and gender rooted in collective consciousness. In the middle of the movie, Magic Candy helps Celine and Julie to open the door to the "haunted house". They want to rescue a little girl from the love relationship of three adults. If the two protagonists and screenwriters have established the character's glamour, Levitt borrows the haunted house in Henry James' novel "The Other House" to extend the game of Celine and Julie, it is the magical touch of the entire narrative structure. Julie's apartment is filled with vitality, and the haunted house is a counterpart, filled with the breath of death. The experience of Celine and Julie in the haunted house is a parody of the classic Hollywood narrative. There are bourgeois-style ornate furnishings, endless competitions, adventures, and murders among women. The camera is no longer rhythmic, and all the characters breathe depressed breath with rigid body movements.

The haunted house is like a residence for death fairy tales. There are handsome fathers, poisoned women and little girls who are about to suffocate to death. They are all blurred. The little girl is the rescuer of Celine and Julie. Don't forget, they all have their beloved dolls, they eat fruit candy, the men in their world can't even tell the true lover from the fake, they are subversive female knights. If the little girl can be rescued, the doll can be brought to life. Levitt chooses fairy tales and gender to attack, from the technique of subverting narrative to the prototype of subverting narrative. Early human fairy tale prototypes delineated the territory of narrative, and the birth of movie narrative was nothing more than the construction of a more magnificent fortress on this territory. Levitt doesn't want men, but allows women, little girls, candy, and magic to break through the heavy puppets and open up the infinite space of narrative.

The fun is far more than that, just as the story of Celine and Julie is far from limited to one possibility. Levitt, as always, is the best. His method of tame audience is never entertaining (audiences who try to get pleasure from Emmanuel Pia’s nakedness must have had a tragic experience). Every time Celine and Julie visit the haunted house separately, they can only get dreamlike memory fragments. These segments are roughly repeated, but there are differences in rhythm or content. The audience is then invited to enter the creative level and piece together their own version in fragments. This wonderfully coincides with the way the two leading actors participate in the screenwriting. Juliet Bardot (played by Celine) once said that the way she and Dominique Labriet wrote the script was to tell each other the dream they had last night, and then figure out the next story.

Levitt's films can always provide magical viewing experience, full of enlightenment, or stunned. Borrowing the wandering stories of two women, he released the power of creation to the actors and then to the audience. This is the creation of creation, the narrative escapes the haunted house and breathes freely.