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Cleo
from 5 to 7 Program Notes
Cleo
from 5 to 7
by Molly Haskell
Agnes 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
ange, 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 in 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 photojournalistic 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, where 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 verite 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 cafe, 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 Creatures. One Sings,
the Other Doesn’t, the feminist anthem
and bonding picture, is perhaps her most political film, and
— surprisingly 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.
Author
and critic Molly Haskell was a longtime staff writer for the
Village
Voice, New York magazine, and Vogue. She has also
written extensively for the New York Times, Esquire, the
Nation, the Guardian, and the New York Review of Books.
She is currently appearing on Turner Classic Movies’
The Essentials. Her books include From Reverence to
Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies and Holding
My Own in No Man’s Land: Women and Men and Films and Feminists.
Cleo
Discussion Questions:
Molly
Haskell says that Cleo becomes “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.” Does the Tarot card reader’s prediction that Cleo
will undergo a “complete transformation,” indicate that she
will evolve in this way, or simply that she will die? Discuss
Cleo’s narcissistic personality at the beginning of the film
(Being ugly, that’s what death is. As long as I’m beautiful,
I’m more alive than the others.) and the apparent change
(Today everything amazes me) that seems to occur in
the second half.
Agnes
Varda shot Cleo from 5 to 7 in a quasi-documentary
style, with most of the action occurring on the streets of Paris
, and in “real time” as opposed to “movie time.” What kind of
challenges does this decision present with regard to the logistics
(ex: clocks in the film?) and the narrative line? How does Varda
create dramatic tension in such a short space?
Cleo
from 5 to 7 was
made in 1961 and is very much a picture of Paris life at that
time. Just the presence of a hat shop dates it. But how different
was life then from any global metropolis in the 21st century?
What similarities and differences can you see in Cleo’s world
to ours?
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