In France, the hours from five to seven are ordained as lovers’ meeting time. For Cleo that afternoon, there could not be anything further from her mind than sex. She is counting the minutes until she hears back on results from tests which she feels are going to tell her that she is dying from cancer. Agnes Varda’s “Cleo from 5 to 7” runs for 90 minutes, but its clock seems to tick along with Cleo’s.
Varda is sometimes called the godmother of the French New Wave. I have been guilty of that myself. It could hardly be more unfair. Varda is its very soul, and only the fact that she is a woman, I fear, prevented her being automatically bracketed with Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer and for that matter her husband Jacques Demy. The passing of time has been kinder to some of her movies than to some of theirs, and “Cléo from 5 to 7” plays today as astonishingly modern. It comes to seem every bit as radical and vanguard as if it had been filmed yesterday .
Cléo (Corinne Marchand) is a fresh-faced, perky young pop singer who has yet to experience great fame, although she has a few songs on the radio and on juke boxes. We happen upon a café where she goes to play one of her songs; we hear a woman complain to her tablemate about the “noise.” I’m not sure if Cléo hears that, even though we do. One of the film’s devices is to take note of the passing comments of other Parisians as they go about their business, while Cléo waits. For example, two lovers split up in another café.
There is something psychologically accurate about this. When you fear your death is near, you become aware of other people in a new way. Yes, you think of the others, you think your life is going on its merry way, but think of me–I have to die. Cléo’s awareness of that deepens a film that is otherwise about mostly trivial events.
For example, she initiates at 5 p.m. by going to see the reader of the Tarot deck. The cards are in color in a black and white film. We are not Tarot readers, but they seem scary to us. The Hanged Man and Death make their ominous appearances, and the Tarot reader reassures Cléo, as such readers always do, that the cards “can mean many things.” Later, when Cléo asks for her palm to be read, the reader looks at it and says, “I don’t read palms.” Not a good sign. Cléo seems a shallow enough woman that these portents depress her.
Walking in Paris with her maid in tow, she enters a hat shop, where she tries on many hats, reflected back at her from the multitudes of mirrors. Which look will she adopt for the moment? It is a summer day, yet she chooses a black fur hat, which crowns her head as a storm warning.
Cléo and the maid return to her apartment, which contains a piano, a bed, two tussling kittens and a lot of empty space. She occupies the bed as a sort of throne, and receives her lover (José Luis de Vilallonga) in a scene that for both of them is clearly more ceremony than passion. One meets one’s lover between 5 and 7? Well then, they will play the game. Sitting by her side is also Bob, her pianeman during rehearsals, played by Michel Legrand, who wrote the score to the film.
It seems thoroughly obvious here with lover and pianoman that Cléo is playing at being a vacant pop heroine, a senseless and vacuous young woman, all affectations and attitude. The two kittens, which Varda somehow contrives to get in the shot, are like props in a farcical musical. And yet throughout this carefree film, somehow Cléo’s awareness of her mortality throbs as a beat in the background, as if it were a muffled bass drum under the gayety. The singer, the lover, the milliner, she plays always a woman waiting to hear she has stomach cancer.
The role is more taxing than it seems, and Corinne Marchand far better in it than could be given credit. What she does here is every bit as remarkable in its own terms as Anna Karina’s celebrated character in Godard’s “My Life to Live.” It’s challenging enough to play a sprite who dances through life, but how in doing so do you convey your consciousness of death? (Both Godard and Karina make cameos in a brief silent film sequence, which we include in a clip below.)
Unlike most of the New Wave directors, Varda was trained not as a filmmaker or as a critic, but as a serious photographer. Try freezing any frame of the scenes in her apartment and you will find perfect composition–perfect, but not calling attention to itself. In moving pictures, she has an ability to capture the essence of her characters not only through plot and dialogue, but even more in their placement in space and light.
While most early New Wave Cléo from 5 to 7 films have a jaunty boldness of style, Varda in this film shows a sensibility towards developing emotions subtly. Consider the sequence near the end. She wanders into a deserted area of a park and runs into the young soldier Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller). They converse. They walk, they take a bus, they walk again. Notice with how colossal tact and restraint he speaks to her. He knows nothing of her concern for the day’s health, but he has his, and Varda’s dialogue permits an emotional bridge between them. Then Cleo’s doctor with almost cruel informality informs her of her test results. Then she talks a little more with the soldier. If you want to think about the ways men and women differ, think about what Antoine tells us, here, is written by a woman, and by many accounts would have been inaccessible to most men.
Agnes Varda, b. 1928, is one of the nicest people I have ever met. There’s no other way to put it. “Saint Agnes of Montparnasse,” I called her, in blog entry I wrote in 2009.
In her magnificent autobiographical film “The Beaches of Agnes” (2009), she comes walking toward us on the sand in the first shot, describing herself as “a little old lady, pleasantly plump.” Well, she isn’t tall. But somehow she isn’t old. She made this film in her 80th year, and looked remarkably similar to 1967, when she brought a Cléo from 5 to 7 film to the Chicago Film Festival. Or the night I had dinner with her, Jacques and Pauline Kael at Cannes 1976. Or when she was at Montreal 1988. Or the sun-blessed afternoon when we three had lunch in their Parisian courtyard in 1990. Or when she was on the jury at Cannes 2005.
Her face is framed by a cap of shining hair. Her eyes are merry and curious. She is brimming with energy, and in “The Beaches of Agnes” you will see her setting up shots involving mirrors on the beach, or operating her own camera, or sailing a boat single-handedly down the Seine under the Pont Neuf, her favorite bridge.
And she has given us the most poetic shot about the cinema I have ever seen, where two old fishermen, who were young when she first filmed them, watch themselves on a screen. Yes, and the screen and the 16mm projector itself are both mounted on an old market cart that they push through the nighttime streets of their village.
That shot, made near the end of her career, contains the mystery of cinema. She filmed those men when they were young, and now half a century has passed for all of them and that shot endures. You sense the same life and sympathy in “Cléo from 5 to 7,” where she sees the surface so clearly, and what is under it still more clearly. The film is available on DVD in the Criterion Collection, and it can be streamed at Hulu and Hulu Plus.
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