France drama
1962
color 90 min.
Director: Agnes Varda
CLV: $49.95 - available
1 disc, catalog # CC1519L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
Agnès Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7, the first fully-achieved feature by the woman who would
become the premiere female director of her generation, dazzled when it opened, and looks even
more timely today in its tackling of the fashionable subject of female identity as a function
of how women see and are seen by the world. Its appearance in 1962 signaled Varda's participation
in the collective burst of talent that made the early sixties one of the most exciting and
creative periods the cinema has ever known. All the rejuvenating forces of French cinema
were coalescing in a rapidfire succession of new names, new films, the "New Wave": 1962
was the same year of husband Jacques Demy's La Baie des anges, a year after
Truffaut's Jules and Jim and Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, two years
after Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless and three after Claude Chabrol's Les Cousins
and Les Bonnes femmes. More than any of the others, one feels in Cleo the influential
shadow of Godard (he actually appears in a film within the film), in the heady exhilaration
at breaking narrative rules, in the use of hand-held camera and the featuring of Paris itself
as a character in the film.
Varda didn't share the film-buff (and theoretical Cahiers du Cinema) roots of Truffaut
and Godard; rather, her background as a photojournalist, then documentarian, expresses itself
in the styling of striking images upon which the rush of news-of-the-day events are constantly
intruding. The story is of a woman, a spoiled pop singer named Cleo (Corinne Marchand) suddenly
confronting cancer -- and, what for her is even worse than death, the possibility of ugliness
and disfigurement. Varda's photojournalist instincts are apparent in the way she turns Paris
into a hall of mirrors -- windows and faces that reflect the heroine back to herself. We follow
as she wanders through different sections of the city in the two hours preceding a dreaded
doctor's appointment when she will get her final test results. It is an odyssey that, like so
many French films, is about the double delight of watching a beautiful woman against the
backdrop of the most beautiful of cities, but it is also a spiritual journey from blindness
to awareness, and from self-absorption to the possibility of love. In showing us a woman whose
sense of self is formed not by inner desires and drives but by her need for approval in the eyes
of others, Varda is confronting the vanity of a beautiful woman as well as her beauty.
In the first scene, the superstitious Cleo receives grim news from a fortune teller, with the
figure of death appearing in the Tarot cards. The seer assures her the card can also mean
transformation, but Cleo is not a woman who can deal with the idea of aging, maturing, or
dying. As she leaves the apartment in shock, Varda uses jump cuts to fragment her descent on
the staircase, a Duchamp-like cubist sequence that expresses her splintering sense of self. The
same sense of disorientation is captured in the vérité camera that follows her through
the crowded Parisian streets, often eliciting stares from passers-by. Cleo gazes at herself in
store windows, meets a woman companion at a café, buys a hat, and returns with the friend
to her apartment. On the trip home, their taxi is accosted by students noisily demonstrating;
on the radio we hear news of the Algerian war, of Kennedy and Kruschev. The real world and the
interventions of style are equally important to a director who is a fascinating and paradoxical
blend of social consciousness and a hyper-aesthetic approach. Cleo's apartment, a fairy-tale
white-on-white lair with a canopied bed, is a stage setting for the singer as star of her at-home
theatre. First she "receives" a briefly alighting lover, then her musicians (the composer is
played by the film's composer, Michel Legrand) who bring out a mischievous side to Cleo.
Bland and doll-like for the first portion of the film, she suddenly thrusts off the wig
she has been wearing, becoming more human in the process. She asks to be alone, another
significant step, as she goes off again into the streets. With this symbolic gesture, she
becomes more inquisitive, more aware of the world outside her. She spends time with a woman
friend, watches a jokey silent film, and in the Bois-de-Boulogne, encounters a chatty
serviceman (Antoine Bourseiller) whose intellectual curiosity disarms her. He has no idea who
she is, and in his engaging company, she is taken outside herself, gradually entering into a
world of real human exchange.
In a lovely series of moments that echoes Murnau's great streetcar scene in Sunrise, she
and her soldier take a long bus ride through Paris on their way to the hospital.
The tension between a superficial high-gloss beauty and a dryer and deeper grounding in life
marks all of Varda's works, sometimes ambiguously as in Le Bonheur, sometimes fancifully
as in Les Créatures. One Sings, the Other Doesn't, the feminist anthem and
bonding picture is perhaps her most political film, andsurprisingly for such an overt "message"
movie, one of her most enduring -- while Vagabond, the 1985 film starring Sandrine
Bonnaire as an unrepentant drifter who refuses to present herself as a female object and
eludes all claims of men and law, is the masterpiece toward which the remarkable
Cleo from 5 to 7 points.
Through an arresting use of Paris as both visual centerpiece and reflection of a woman's
inner journey, Varda paints an enduring portrait of a woman's evolution from a shallow and
superstitious child-woman to a person who can feel and express shock and anguish and finally
empathy. In the process, the director adroitly uses the camera's addiction to beautiful women's
faces to subtly question the consequences of that fascination -- on us, on them.
-- Molly Haskell
Molly Haskell is the author of Holding My Own in No Manıs Land, a collection of film and
book reviews. She writes a monthly column for The Observer and a quarterly film column for
On the Issues.
Cast
Cléo: Corinne Marchand
Antoine, the soldier: Antoine Bourseiller
Angèle: Dominique Davray
Dorothée: Dorothée Blank
Bob: Michel Legrand
L'amant: José-Luis de Vilallonga
Credits
Directed and written by Agnès Varda
Produced by: Georges de Beauregard
Edited by: Janine Verneau
Cinematography by: Jean Rabier
Music by: Michel Legrand
Transfer
This new digital transfer was created using a 35mm fine grain black and white masterpositive
print and a 35mm optical soundtrack print. The transfer was supervised and approved by director
Agnès Varda. Cleo is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1.
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