Cléo from 5 to 7
Directed by: Agnès Varda - 1 hour, 30 minutes - 1962 – France, Italy – B&W/Color - DVD - 1.66:1
Starring: Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray
Cléo Victoire (Corinne Marchand) sits in a café and thinks about herself, as she usually does. She thinks about her life and her music career. And she thinks about the results of the medical test she took that afternoon, and the bad portents she saw at the tarot reading she just left. She will know the test results in two hours. Cléo meets with friends and wanders the streets of Paris, seeing reflections everywhere. She buys new hats, admires herself, and thinks to herself, “Ugliness is a kind of death... As long as I'm beautiful, I'm alive more than others.” She is spoiled, and her friends indulge her. She walks into a café, incognito behind sunglasses, and puts one of her songs on the jukebox, only to see the café patrons’ indifference. She comes home to meet with her songwriters and try out some new arrangements. She hates nearly all of their songs – she says they are all morbid, depressing. She decides to leave and puts a new dress on. “I’ll wear black. It goes with your songs.” She takes to the street again.
Cléo from 5 to 7 is told in quasi-real time, though it’s still subjective (the film is only 90 minutes), paying attention to small moments and mundane actions, or as mundane as anything can be in Paris. The city is sometimes a comfort, often a busy maze, occasionally a horror show. A street performer swallows a frog to the delight of the crowd before vomiting it onto the sidewalk. Men leer at Cléo from all directions. We overhear conversations in crowded cafés – not sure if she can hear them with us.
Cléo was Agnès Varda’s second feature film, following La Pointe Courte (1954), which some critics consider to be the first film of the French New Wave. Varda would continue to be associated with the New Wave and particularly with the Left Bank directors within it. She brought a unique sensibility to the groups, as she was (for many years) the only woman, and one of the few in the group who didn’t come from a cinema background, though she was an accomplished photographer. In her review, Pauline Kael called Cléo, “one of the few films directed by a woman in which the viewer can sense a difference.” Varda’s lack of cinema experience makes Cléo an even more extraordinary achievement. Her photography background shines throughout, and makes this one of the most beautifully-shot films of the ‘60s, while still retaining the loose, almost documentary-like style, subjective time, and other techniques of the New Wave. All of this is set to an outstanding soundtrack by Michel Legrand, who also plays Cléo’s composer in the film. Legrand was later best known for doing the music for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), the musical directed by Varda’s husband, Jacques Demy.