Over rated film by a highly over rated filmmaker

It's not Borges or Barthes influenced just because it has a Chinese box narrative structure. Those writers' plots tend to make sense.

In my opinion, this is an example of how the drug use of the time not only forms a subplot - the two women metaphorically dropping tabs in order to return to a kind of house of narrative in order to see how a story plays out - but how drug use can apparently affect the screenplay itself.

I cannot understand how viewers find either good slapstick or interesting shots here. (With the exception of two small boats silently drifting by one another on a lake, which is beautiful.)

Apart from the acid metaphor making up the bulk of the film, and the unrevealing doubling of characters, I take the narrative as suggesting that the adventures within it result from an incantation uttered by a librarian reading a magick book in a park. She summons the other character, her double, a lover, a counterpart, and that's where things begin, with a chase scene between them. That that chase scene gets reversed later on, and so on, does not mean the project is sophisticated.

For a French New Wave film with a fiendishly intricate plot that makes sense I would suggest Chabrol's "Swindle." That film also contains an examination of aspects of the feminine - of agency, of wiles, of being an object - in my opinion, although it appears to be merely a film about pickpockets and con artists. It is not easy to understand at the level of plot or in terms of what it is getting at, I can assure you. Good readings of it are hard to find; it just doesn't have the credibility granted to "Celine."

For the whole meta film aspect I would suggest Renoir's "The Golden Coach." Now that's magic, if outwardly of a more conventional sort.