Celine and Julie Goe Boating (1974)

  Content warning:  child death, blood

Julie (Dominique Labourier) is minding her own business, learning witchcraft in the park --as one does-- when she sees a woman drop a scarf.  This simple act leads her to meet Céline (Juliet Berto), a stage magician and general pathological liar.  One of Céline's side-gigs is at a mansion in Paris that appears to be abandoned except for the days that she shows up.  She walks inside the house, and then some time later is violently pushed back out, remembering nothing, but with a piece of hard candy in her mouth.  Julie switches places with her one day, and the same thing happens.  Only when she eats the candy later does she remember the events, where two women --Sophie (Marie-France Pisier) and Camille (Bulle Ogier)-- scheme over a recent widower (Barbet Schroeder) with a sick child, Madlyn (Nathalie Asnar).  Julie or Céline find themselves in the body of Madlyn's nurse, Angéle, playing out the same events over and over, unable to stop Madlyn from being murdered.  The women decide that they must do something to save the little girl by figuring out whether Sophie or Camille is the killer.

This movie is 3 hours and 14 minutes long.  Just going to put that out there first.  It is incredibly shaggy, as in you just follow Céline and Julie around for like half the runtime before you even get to the central mystery.  That may put some of you off and I get it.  But if you give it a chance, this movie is incredibly entertaining.  Labourier and Berto are so charming and lively that it's not a hardship to watch them run-around like Lucy and Ethel on the set of a Twilight Zone soap opera.  

It's streaming on the Criterion Channel.