English Title: Cleo from 5 to 7
Director: Agnès Varda
1962
Drama
Running Time: 1hr 30mins
Cert: PG
French with English Subtitles
“The portrait of a woman painted on to a documentary about Paris and a must watch for it’s defining role in French New Wave cinema”
Agnès Varda‘s vibrant portrayal of the energy and atmosphere of 1960’s Paris is seen through the experiences of Cléo, a young and pretty singer, who is waiting for the results of a cancer biopsy. From superstition to fear, from the Rue de Rivoli to the Café du Dôme, from coquetry to anxiety, from her apartment to Parc Montsouris, Cleo lives through ninety peculiar minutes. Her lover, a musician accompanist, a female friend, and then a soldier open up her eyes to the world.
Arriving with the first surge of the French New Wave, Cléo from 5 to 7 crackles with the energy and modernity, full of the movement’s innovative technique, on-location filming and a focus on realism and personal expression. Ultimately an introspective piece, characterised by the philosophical preoccupations of Varda’s Left Bank peers. Corinne Marchand plays Cléo, a blonde pop singer whose vanity relaxes as her anxieties swell. As the film begins, she visits a tarot reader, hoping for good news about the cancer test results she is awaiting – but the cards spell only death, and transformation.
While Cléo’s mind is fixed on the future, Varda’s camera captures her in the present tense, killing time in Paris as she ponders her own decay. Echoing Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, Varda dissects a trip down the stairs to emphasise the moment as it passes, one we would otherwise have missed. As Cléo, a Parisian Mrs Dalloway, walks the streets of her city, Varda also captures a broader sense of time: Paris in the early 1960s, with its crowds, cafés, shops, music, fashion and cinema. The geography is precise: Varda called the film “the portrait of a woman painted on to a documentary about Paris”.
Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life. Cléo de 5 à 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.
