This review should've been written a long time ago but has been left unfinished so it's time to finish it.
The title is a pun: aller en bateau (to go in a boat) also means to "to get caught up in a yarn", and the movie is chockful of puns.
Rivette's sense of time is leisurely, and you must really submit to the movie on its own terms which is extraordinarily hard. By the end of the first hour, I was ready to walk out; by the end of the second hour, wild horses wouldn't have dragged me out of there; by the end of its 193 minutes, I was ready to declare it as possibly one of the greatest things that can be done in the cinematic medium.
You must submit to its leisurely long-winding logic before a payoff is delivered. And what a payoff!
In a world of instant gratification, this is quite liberating.
To tell too much about the story would be giving it away so it's about magic, friendship, memory, the child's love of story-telling particularly involving the macabre, watching a clockwork device work out its inevitable logic after it's been wound up.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, but alley-oop! the clock just vanished. Now what?
The movie very self-consciously pays hommage to "Alice in Wonderland" -- it's jam-packed with Alice references -- with plenty of side references to just about everybody else - Cocteau, Buñuel, Genet.
Not to be missed if ever it plays, and yes, you have to watch this in the theater. You have to be immersed in it with no interruptions.
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