Country: France
Director: Agnès Varda
Time: 1 hour and 29 minutes
What It Elicits: Paris, thoughts on identity, and musings on mortality
Where Can I Get It: Criterion (w/subscription), Kanopy (free w/library card), GooglePlay ($3.99 to rent)
What to do with all that anomie? On the surface, Cléo, the protagonist of Agnès Varda’s 1962 film, has it all: a burgeoning career as a pop singer, indelible beauty, artsy friends, and a wealthy boyfriend who, as one character bemusedly notes, actually loves her. At the same time, impending test results for a stomach ailment and a visit to a tarot card reader have her in a rut. Thus the context in which Varda’s camera accompanies Cléo throughout her (just about) two-hour long jaunt through Paris as she awaits her medical prognosis.
Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) is the classic entry point into the amorphous French New Wave. His American gangster flick remix, featuring Jean Paul Belmondo as the pinnacle of cool and Jean Seberg as the apotheosis of chic, is worth watching for the cuts alone. On the surface, Cléo From 5 to 7 appears to avoid the declamatory spirit of Godard’s masterpiece. Varda asks us to grapple with a person: fractured, dramatic, insecure, and conceited. Cléo offers a fair amount of petulance and elicits a not unreasonable amount of eye rolling from those around her. She is not naturally sympathetic. Yet, is Cléo the vain one? Or are we (as audience) implicated through our engagement with her various roles? To elucidate the point, Varda surfaces mirrors throughout, drawing attention to various forms of gaze. For much of the film, Cléo remains a mystery, in some sense to her audience, and in some sense to herself, continually rejecting superficial classification. She is trapped—the ensorcelling beauty of others’ fantasies and projections—while at the same time reflexive enough to play various roles depending upon her audience. On one level, Cléo is a movie about performance—Godard and Anna Karina feature in a film within the film to underscore the theme—and, on another, it is about the disjuncture between the person we imagine ourselves capable of becoming, the person we are, and the person others perceive us to be. Thus, it is also a film about self-discovery. And Cléo’s modest transformation, spread across an evening of encounters with friends and unknowns, is one of the great testaments to the humanizing quality of film.
Go Down The (French New Wave) Rabbit Hole With:
Jean-Luc Godard — Breathless (1960)
Louis Malle — Zazie dans le Métro (1961)