Cleo from 5 to 7 Dated, but Has Virtues

 

 

Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Directed by Agnès Varda

Athos Films, 90 minutes, Not-rated

In French with subtitles, Black and white

★★★

 

In its day, this Agnès Varda film was considered so pathbreaking that it was considered one of the greatest films ever made by a female director. Key phrase: in its day. It hasn’t weathered very well in all regards, though it still has its virtues.

 

This was Varda’s first full-length film and established her cred with the French New Wave movement. Like others of that genre it broke with traditional narratives, interjected social issues, and dealt more with the inner lives of its subjects. Cléo from 5 to 7 has the additional break from “movies” in that it is cinéma vérité, meaning in this case that it has the feel of a documentary. This is understandable as Varda had previously been a photojournalist.

 

The title has nothing to do with a young girl. The film looks at two hours in the life of Cléo Victoire (Corrine Marchand). She is a famous pop singer who keeps a boudoir to which men flock as if she were a high-class madam. Cléo is suffering from ennui for reasons her lover and hangers-on cannot cure. First of all, there is a possibility that she has stomach cancer–an eventuality made all-too-conceivable by a visit to a tarot card reader in which her cards pop up in succession as The Hangman and Death. Second, she is tired of being a commodity and has come to doubt her own identity. When she changes from her lounge clothing, takes off her wig, and scrubs her face a fresh-looking and beautiful young woman emerges, yet when she goes into a café and plays her own record on the juke box, no one recognizes her.

 

Cléo cannot deal with the very idea of having cancer. She seeks out her friend Dorothée, a nude model at an art studio, who tries to divert Cléo by driving through Paris–she’s a new driver, so that’s a thrill in itself–and by taking her to see a silly silent movie, one in which of all people, Jean-Luc Godard appears. Her friend tells her that all will be well, but Cléo sinks further into her anxieties and vows to kill herself if she has cancer.

 

A funny thing happens on the way to the clinic to get her test results. She wanders into a park and encounters a young man named Antoine who has no idea who she is and doesn’t care. He is on leave from the Algerian War, a very traumatic event in French history that collapsed the French Fourth Republic and led to Algerian independence the year Cléo from 5 to 7 came out. The irony of this would not have been lost on French viewers of the day, nor would the 30,000 French war dead be far from anyone’s mind. (Algerian casualties were approximately 10 times higher.)

 

In essence, both Cléo and Antoine have a profound sense they might be living on borrowed time. She has worked herself into a frenzy over the idea, but he is stoic and determined to enjoy the short time before he must report back to duty. Varda’s film takes on a sheen of a one-hour affair, but an intellectual and emotional one, not a sexual tryst. Amazingly, there is something very sensual about a joyful streetcar ride and walking together across the hospital grounds.

 

 Cléo from 5 to 7 is a mannered film, not an action movie. Varda would have dismissed the very thought of making the latter as banal. The more one ponders the film, the more it becomes subtly profound. It’s a macabre game we’ve all probably played at some point in our lives. If you knew you had two hours before a death sentence was announced, how would you spend them? Varda gives it a more profound twist in that neither principal knows if the Hangman is coming.

 

It must be said that today’s viewers will have trouble relating to 1962 gender dynamics. All I can say to that is different time/different values. But kudos to a bit of Varda sneakiness. She employs a documentary approach to Cléo’s two hours in a tidy 90 minutes!

 

Rob Weir