France
4*
Director:
Agnès Varda
Screenwriter:
Agnès Varda
Directors of Photography:
Jean Rabier
Alain Levent
Running time: 90 minutes
Original title: Cléo de 5 à 7
A morbid sense of impending doom hangs over this seemingly lighthearted frolic in the Parisian sunshine. Cléo is a young woman who is expecting the results of a medical examination, which a fortune-teller leads her to believe might be catastrophic and certainly involves the prospect of death. We follow her as she passes the time buying a hat, driving in a taxi, meeting friends and trying to relax in the Parc de Montsouris.
Cléo from 5 to 7 takes place in real-time, though director Agnès Varda crams much more into her 90 minutes (the film is really Cléo from 5 to 6.30, but the title wouldn’t have had the same zap) than is actually possible, but never mind – the effect of watching everything unfold in apparent real-time is exhilarating. The audience shares the ups and downs of the main character, Florence Victoire, nicknamed Cléo – for Cleopatra – by her friends, though admittedly her melodramatic nature (a point made over and over again) does make her appear wholly unstable at times.
Varda as a director is very active in this film, which seems deceptively improvised, but contains many moments that visibly enrich the thematic texture of the film. Starting with the tarot card of death in the opening scene, the only part of the film that is in colour, Cléo from 5 to 7 has a whole array of very brief shots – either from Cléo’s point of view or from the camera’s point of view, though the camera often identifies with the main character and we get many looks on the street directed at the camera. Besides a broken mirror and a scene at the aftermath of a gunshot, we also see funeral homes, a café called “Bonne Santé” (Good Health), a street performer piercing his biceps in a scene of real body horror, and we hear a radio report of Edith Piaf’s latest operation. Another very well-crafted moment occurs in the darkness of a tunnel when Cléo tells her friend Dorothée that she might be seriously ill.
At the time of the film’s release, the spectre of colonial war, the conflict in Algeria, was pervasive but also serves an important function in this film – a function that only becomes clear towards the end of the story, in the calm setting of the 14th arrondissement’s Parc de Montsouris.
While Cléo from 5 to 7 was not Varda’s first feature-length fiction film (her 1955 film, La Pointe courte, had already established her as a force to be reckoned with, or rather one to be inspired by, and anticipated the revitalisation of the French film industry at the end of the 1950s that would be called the Nouvelle Vague), it has the same kind of playful humanity that made Godard’s À Bout de souffle such a charm, and the play with form is best appreciated in a short silent film which the boyfriend of Cléo’s friend Dorothée, a projectionist at a cinema, screens for them. The film shows two different kinds of realities, one seen through darkness (or sunglasses), the other without them, and perhaps the only other silent-film-within-a-film that I have seen which has amused me as much was Almodóvar’s Shrinking Man in Talk to Her.
The film constantly reminds the viewer how much time has passed, and how much time is left, by means of text on the screen that informs us of the current time as well as the main protagonist for the next part. A little tongue-in-cheek, the different “chapters” go up to number 13, clearly linking with the numerous mentions of superstition throughout the film; it is an unexpectedly beautiful and emotional moment when we realise who the protagonist(s) of the final chapter are.
Cléo from 5 to 7 has a ditzy central character who is waiting for some news that might change her life, or maybe her life will be changed in the process of waiting. The film is simple and consists of small conversations from daily life that do not seem staged for the benefit of a fiction film, but rather evoke a certain feeling of humanity that is so important in a film that wants both the dread and the sunshine.