It begins in color, with a tarot card reading prompted by a young woman, desperately driven by fear and uncertainty, looking for some shred of direction to steer her through the swirl of emotion, pain, erotic pressures and perpetual, obsessive self-consciousness that life has dealt her at this moment in time. Whether the cards actually foretell something, or if the medium has merely honed her skill at speaking in peculiarly insightful generalities is hardly worth debating. The crucial point is that this wrenching encounter serves as the stimulus sending a beautiful but fragile young woman on a 90 minute voyage of self-discovery that the rest of us are privileged to eavesdrop on in Agnes Varda's delightfully engaging nouvelle vague showpiece Cleo from 5 to 7.
Like other early 1960s pop culture super-groups (the Fantastic Four, the original X-Men, and various iterations of the Avengers), the French New Wave seemed content to have a lone female member among their numbers to provide a token of gender balance to the effort. The model was copied elsewhere: in Czechoslovakia's New Wave, Vera Chytilova served in that role in the mid-1960s, while in the New German Cinema of the 1970s, Margarethe von Trotta provided the voice of feminism for that movement. The original new wave, the one that emanated from France at the beginning of the 1960s, features as its leading woman a director whose work nearly a decade earlier stands as an indisputable stylistic forerunner to what Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Resnais, her husband Jacques Demy and others established as they set the standard for how young insolent upstarts mounted their challenge to prevailing studio strangleholds on creative control.
The pace, attitude and affected naturalism of Varda's La Pointe Courte (from 1954) still comes across as remarkably unique and prescient among films of that era, in foreseeing what was to come several years hence. But back to the film at hand. It's not like Varda had just been sitting around throughout the 1950s waiting for filmgoer's tastes to catch up with her own. She'd been making some interesting short films, gathering ideas, collaborating with her friends in the Parisian Left Bank scene and, when the time was right, re-entering the feature film arena as the commercial appeal of the nouvelle vague expanded the market for her and her peers. Certainly she benefited from the openness and curiosity extended to a new generation of directors, and she deserves credit for making the most of her opportunity. Because she was able to incorporate a distinctively feminine point of view, politically progressive but also nearly universally accessible, Cleo From 5 to 7 still stands as a dual-purpose artistic statement - both capturing the essential spirit of the times it was created in and transcending that era to speak effectively to the concerns of women and men living 50 years later.
Cleo (a stage name; her birth name, we eventually learn, is Florence) is a tall, attractive and notably popular young singer, just on the cusp of wider fame, with singles beginning to garner broad airplay on France's version of Top 40 radio. By all external appearances, she's got a good thing going on, easily drawing the attention of male admirers, building a fan base among the general public and possessing all the physical attributes that people less naturally gifted might find enviable. Despite all that, she's deeply troubled. A persistent stomach ailment and troubling medical diagnoses have invoked the specter of cancer, leading a seemingly vibrant woman in her early 20s to ponder serious thoughts of her own mortality and the superfluousness of everything that she's accomplished to this point in her life. With that backdrop of existential dread and futility, Cleo leaves the tarot reading, her mind filled with bad omens, to seek out some facsimile of purpose, resolution or, failing that, at least a sufficiently engaging distraction to take her mind off her problems.
Besides being effortlessly gorgeous and a talented performer, Corrine Marchand's portrayal of Cleo has the added benefit of scrupulous intelligence. She's surrounded by players of varying skill, from her sophisticated and presumably wealthy lover who breezes into her apartment, laying a few seeds he intends to harvest in future seductions, to the assorted musicians, wolf-whistlers and itinerant military men who seize upon her as a foil to practice their most shopworn pickup lines. Aware of her own attractiveness and supremely deft at extracting all the advantages available to her whenever she steps in front of a mirror or any other highly reflective surface (many of which she comes across in her brief sojourn), Cleo wages a one-woman tug of war with a universe that has gifted her extraordinarily but now seems right on the verge of revoking all that she's come to take for granted... but how can this be? Aside from her self-directed mission to find purpose and relief, she's almost equally preoccupied fending off the advances of those who want a piece of her mind, body or soul - at least just enough to maintain her own space for thinking things through and sorting out the options on her own terms.
Cleo also has a career to tend to, as she does her best to navigate the choppy currents of pop stardom in a way that allows her to hang on to some measure of self respect. Accepting and performing the material that her musical collaborators present to her proves to be a serious challenge, not so much in the realm of aesthetics (she has a strong voice and impeccable delivery) but more in regard to summoning the professional detachment that allows her to simply perform without over-identifying with the emotional content of her songs. This clip shows her approaching and surpassing that limit, just for a moment, before she reasserts control:
As if taking a cue from the title of her song, Cleo finds a solution for the moment - to be alone, "without you," or anybody else for that matter. But rather than seeking out true isolation apart from humanity (a daunting task for anyone stuck as she is in the middle of a major metropolis), Cleo simply takes to the streets and follows her hearts impulse. Varda shows every step and stage of her journey through Paris, in real time (with subtly placed clocks popping up on screen along with chapter titles every few minutes to remind us that we're seeing "everything" that Cleo goes from 5 until a half-hour before 7 p.m.)
Though it sounds like a vain conceit - and to what purpose? one may wonder - the format works remarkably well. That's in part because Cleo's walk and rides travel through such a photogenic and fascinating part of the world, and also because Varda's skill in framing the shots from interesting angles bestows an aura of exaltation and timelessness on all the mundane details that unfold in the background and all around her subject. Street traffic, the gaze of admiring strangers, local landmarks, architecture, vegetation, the play of light and shadow - because Varda seeks to capture the whole of Cleo's environment and her acute sensitivity to what she perceives happening in and around her, the significance of things said and things communicated in other ways resonates more fully and sinks in a bit more deeply than such scenes ordinarily would in a more conventionally told story. Michel LeGrand's tasteful string arrangements also cast a glistening sonic wash over all that the audience sees, enhancing our sense of identification with Cleo, despite the distance she seeks to maintain from all onlookers.
One of Cleo from 5 to 7's most well-known and ostensibly charming calling-cards to its audience is the incorporation into its story of one of those intriguing short films I mentioned earlier in this essay. It's titled Les Fiances du Pont McDonald, and it stars Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina and a few other nouvelle vague pals. The film, which weaves its way into the narrative as Cleo and her friend pay a short visit to the projection booth of a small movie theater, is a rollicking bit of clowning about, performed and shot along the lines of a comedy short subject of the late 1910s or early 1920s, I'd guess. Shot right around the time that Godard and Karina were wrapping up A Woman is a Woman, Les Fiances is happily preserved as a unique curio of its times, but comes across as a dispensable bit of padding after being viewed a time or two. I find myself tempted to hit the fast forward button and return to Cleo's real life, so much more compelling is her story (though I suppose it's every bit as fictional and contrived as the slapstick antics of the short film.) I don't know if Varda was trying to say something specific about entertainment as diversion from reality, or if using that footage was just a means to provide some amusement and curiosity for those (both then and now) who need to be drawn in by the presence of trendy celebrities to hold their attention.
After a dreadful omen (a dropped and broken mirror, harbinger of death) spurs Cleo to leave the theater, parting ways with her model friend who took her there, she makes her way to a park, where the promise of a more genuine isolation seems to await, but is never quite realized. Instead, while contemplating a tranquil waterfall, she's approached by a soldier half in uniform who naturally finds her much too alluring to be left unattended. Though Cleo's guard instinctively rises as he initiates the exchange, some combination of her inner turmoil and his affable, nothing-to-lose charm leads her to give him just enough attention for her to be drawn into an extended conversation. She learns that he's mere hours away from shipping out to a deployment in Algeria, where he faces the real threat of sudden death or serious injury in the war going on there. Perhaps his smiling indifference to what fate may have in store puts her own anxieties in perspective; maybe she just finds herself inexplicably in the mood to be seduced by an amusing stranger (yes, as the cards foretold...) However we choose to analyze and explain the change (assuming that we choose to at all), we see a different side of Cleo as the sequence unfolds - more relaxed, at ease, willing at least for a few minutes to set aside her diva tendencies and warm up a bit, even to the point of holding the soldier's hand as they contemplatively stroll the campus of the hospital where she missed her doctor's appointment.
Criticism from some that Cleo from 5 to 7 is diminished by a too-tidy ending notwithstanding, I find the conclusion satisfyingly ambivalent and open ended. A chance meeting with the physician gives Cleo some assurance that her prognosis is not as grim as she was dreading, though there's nothing more definitive than the doctor's hastily delivered advice that "two months of chemo" should clear everything up just fine. She seems rather trusting of what may be nothing more than casual happy talk to spare his patient some awkwardness and distress in a public setting. But in this case, it's all for Cleo's best, as she attains a state (however temporary it may turn out to be) of resolve and tranquility that enables her to be more fully in the moment than she was probably even capable of in the previous hour and a half, and at least as long as she'd been stewing over her illness. A happy turn of events for her, and for her soldier friend too, as they stare into each other's eyes with a glint of tenderness and focus that wasn't reciprocal a few minutes ago, leaving us all wondering just how they spent that next half hour.
Next: L'eclisse