Film: Cléo de 5 à 7
Director: Agnès Varda
Country: France
Released: April 1962
Runtime: 90 minutes
Genre: Drama
Studio: Athos
Influenced: Jane Campion, Kelly Reichardt, Céline Sciamma, Catherine Breillat, Mia Hansen-Løve
Cléo de 5 à 7 starts with a Tarot card reading that doesn't go well, and Varda shoots the scene in an innovative way, with a mixture of colour shots from above revealing the cards and black & white shots of the faces and the dialogue. Other innovations include the way the film is broken up into small instalments and takes place in real-time across the space of 90 minutes, i.e. chapter 1 from 17:05 to 17:08, chapter 2 from 17:08 to 17:13, etc. There are 13 chapters in total and the film's narrative focuses on Cléo's wanderings around Paris and her evolution from emotionally immature starlet to self-assured woman, passing through a sort of cocoon phase of contemplative silence and listening to others.
Throughout the film, Varda experiments with various cinematic techniques, such as jump cuts, subjective camera angles and a fragmented narrative structure, to create a dynamic and immersive experience. The film shares many of the aesthetics of the Nouvelle Vague movement with its handheld footage of the streets of Paris and long, uninterrupted takes. Godard also appears in one scene where Cléo is sitting in a café and the camera pans over to reveal him sitting at a nearby table, reading a newspaper – an example of the close-knit community of filmmakers that formed the Nouvelle Vague, with Godard's cameo highlighting the self-referentiality that was characteristic of the movement.
It's also very much Varda's own film too, full of idiosyncrasies such as the frog scene, the pierced bicep and the baby in the incubator, as we see the world through the subjective lens of Cléo (played with style and panache by Corinne Marchand). We also see the world around Cléo through Varda's more objective lens, providing a feminist perspective on the challenges of being a woman and the powerful interplay between beauty and death. "As long as I'm beautiful, I'm more alive than others", Cléo says to herself in the mirror, as if ugliness were a type of death.
In the café, we hear the interior monologue of Cléo's friend-cum-assistant Angèle who thinks that Cléo is a drama queen who needs constant reassurance, but we also see Angèle explain to the waiter that the reason for Cléo's display of emotion is that she is awaiting the results of a medical test. There's a sense of entitlement also in the way that Cléo crosses the road and expects traffic to stop for her and, while hat shopping, we find out Cléo's is an aspiring singer who is gaining a name for herself. During the scenic taxi drive scene across Paris, we listen to the radio announcements about student demonstrations and Edith Piaf's recovery, firmly placing the film in its historical context. Cléo meets with her lover for a brief moment and he tells her that she is strong and that her "beauty is her health", but we can see he is more interested in his own career than in her wellbeing. She also meets with her friend Dorothée, who is a model and seems to embody a more carefree and liberated attitude towards life.
As Cléo wanders around Paris again, she encounters various people, such as a soldier on leave, a homeless man and a street musician. Each encounter provides a new perspective on life and death, and Cléo gradually comes to see the world around her in a different light. She also spends time observing other people, such as a woman singing in a café, a young boy playing with a toy gun and a group of women protesting against the war in Algeria. In the first part, she’s looked at, in the second she looks.
Throughout the film, Varda plays with the idea of time and its subjective nature. Cléo is constantly checking her watch, and the audience is made aware of the passing minutes and seconds through the use of on-screen titles. The film culminates in a scene in a park, where Cléo meets an older woman who is dying of cancer. At that time, and as we see in other contemporary films like Antonioni's La Notte (1961), there was a collective fear of cancer. This encounter forces Cléo to confront her own mortality and to question the value of her life. She returns to the hospital for her test results, but the film ends before the results are revealed. In her final film, Varda by Agnès (2019), Varda explains that limitations from the studio in terms of cost led her to film just an hour and a half in a woman’s life in Paris, showing that constraint as ever is often the mother of invention.
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