Day 72: Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Agnes Varda’s “Cleo from 5 to 7″ concerns itself with the impact time has upon an individual, both in the short span of a few crucial hours and in the framework of a lifetime, while also focusing its lens towards the concept of celebrity, allowing us a window into the life of a person whose fame affects both the way they live and how they look on themselves.

In the film, we follow Cleo (Corinne Marchand) a famous singer who, for an hour and a half, meanders around Paris waiting for the medical results of a possibly fatal biopsy. On edge for the life changing (or ending) news, Cleo meets with a fortune teller, who confirms her worst suspicions- she has cancer and will die soon. Terrified by the prediction and faced with her own mortality, Cleo spends the remainder of her afternoon meeting with those closest to her in an attempt to take her mind off of the ever ticking clock, which will soon reveal her true future.

First, Cleo meets with her assistant and both witness the effect Cleo’s fame has on her ability to live a quiet life as one of her songs play on a nearby jukebox and all eyes fall on Cleo, who would rather be left alone. Next, Cleo goes home to her lavish apartment and encounters both her lover and her song writing team, both who try to cheer her up with little avail as their attitudes are taken as indifference by Cleo and she leaves in them in anger, finding solace instead in the calm landscape of a local city park, where she eventually meets a soldier (Parc Montsouris) on his last day of leave before return to the Algerian war. Finding a common bond through uncertain futures, the two walk together and, eventually, head for the doctor’s office, where Cleo’s results wait to change her life for either better or worse.

A contributor to the early French New Wave movement as well as a member of the small, but famous, “Left Bank Directors” circle, Varda fused aspects of multiple film genres to create “Cleo,” a film that has documentary realism, a few musical pieces, and the essential bare honesty of a New Wave piece. Varda also plays with the concept of “real time cinema” or, in other words, a story that fits in the actual time of the film, in this case, an hour and a half. Though heavily edited to help set the tone of its story and not as faithful to the real time concept as others works, such  as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope,” ”Cleo from 5 to 7″ still uses the technique to heighten even the most mundane moments of Cleo’s life in the film. Though out of context we would simply be watching Cleo sip on a drink in a Paris cafe, in context we see this as possibly her last drink ever and, with this knowledge, we hold more significance for the moment as well as a better understand what Cleo must be thinking as she performs even the simplest of actions. It is with this “real time” technique that we better feel the passing weight of time for Cleo and, though little may be happening, we watch the tension build.

Considered a director whose interest in existentialism runs as a sub-plot in most of her films, Varda does no different with “Cleo” and, in fact, summarizes the film’s entire emotional palate in a surprising single shot. At one point in the film, Cleo is walking down the street and sees two hospital orderlies carrying a small glass incubator that holds a premature infant inside. While those on the street ooh and ahh at the baby and comment on its situation, it is obvious that this scene compacts how Cleo truly feels about her life in a single instant. She is like the child, not fully formed as the person she hopes to be and possibly at death’s door. Her fame also puts her in a glass case to the public, losing her any sense of privacy, and she fears that, like the child in the incubator, the masses will eventually take pity on her.

A subtle, quiet, and, at times, humorous tale, “Cleo from 5 to 7″ is an interesting film both for it’s stab at the real time technique and also it’s study of a woman about to enter a new chapter of her life, which could possibly be her last.

To learn more about “Cleo from 5 to 7,” check out Criterion’s page here.

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