Wonderfully oddJulie (Dominique Labourier), a librarian, sees a frazzled Céline (Juliet Berto) hurry by dropping things, and follows her to return them, but before long the presence of the pursuit shifts, and then shifts again, and Céline is staying with Julie and the story blurs. Somehow one of them has the address of a house, 7 bis Nadir des Pommes, and when they go there (separately) they inhabit fragments of some sort of fraught mysterious past. Gradually the two women, as they inhabit each other's lives, also discover they are in turn participants in the melodrama, which they recover by various sorts of magic, until they manage to observe the plot as a whole, revisit the site and take over, rescuing the intended victim, a little girl. The most charming parts of the movie are the pacing (fragmented and slow) and the repetition of the melodrama scenes, intense and scary at first, and then funny as the two women observe and giggle about the overwrought language, and then hilarious as they prance together through the scene once they've mastered it. Rivette plays constantly with following blind leads and verbal jokes and setting up tableaux from different angles, and mirroringdisguised as her friend, Céline dispatches Julie's suitor (and rightly so), while Julie blows Céline's audition for a seedy magic tour to the middle-east and in the last minutes of the movie, Julie races past Céline in the park, dropping thing, and yes, the chase is on again. The mirroring may have something to do with the most charming part. The inexplicable bond between the two, the way they inhabit each other's minds even as they are just beginning to know each other