Movie Review – Cleo from 5 to 7

Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)
Written and directed by Agnes Varda

I can’t say I have ever dived deep into the iconic French New Wave movement. In college, I watched some Truffaut and Godard, but I don’t think it clicked with me. I would be interested in revisiting it now, as with some maturity, I can appreciate the work better. This idea has come to me after finding out how much I’ve enjoyed the work of Jacques Demy and now his wife, Agnes Varda. From the opening moments of Cleo From 5 to 7, I knew this would instantly become one of my favorite films. 

Only the hands of a fortune teller are seen, while she and Cleo’s voices come from off-screen. The camera focuses on the tarot cards being dealt, and Varda adds captions to explain the role of each position the cards are in. It’s color, the first images we see, yet the rest of the film is a gorgeous black & white. The narrative the card reader gives is the entire plot of the film. Varda apparently had no problem with spoilers, and I love her for that. It should be okay if I know the course of the story I’m about to hear. It should be the storytelling, the style & methods that captivate me. Varda does just this.

Cleo Victoire (Corinne Marchand) is a pop singer who spends the two hours of the film’s runtime waiting on test results from her doctor. There’s a strong likelihood she has cancer. We see these two hours play out in real-time. Captions appear at the bottom of the screen, telling us the time frame as each sequence begins and which character will be the center of attention. It’s not always Cleo. Sometimes, it’s a friend she’s having a conversation with. Others it is her accompanist and lyricist during rehearsal. Cleo will share that spotlight, too, as in a sequence near the end where she shares a walk with a soldier (Antoine Bourseiller) about to be shipped off to push French colonialism in Algeria. 

I can confidently say this: I have not seen a filmmaker with such instant confidence about their work since Federico Fellini. Varda is equal parts playful & majestic in how she uses the camera. Her eye for how to make each & every shot enthralling and beautiful is unmatched in the cinema I’ve experienced. The first few scenes of Cleo feel like Varda going through film school exercises but executing in the most perfect way a director could. In that sense, the film represents a piece to be studied by people getting into movie-making. Varda showcases camera movement, angles, and lighting with immaculate precision. There are moments where, from a technical perspective, I felt I was watching a film made in the present day.

Cleo From 5 to 7 is not just a technical marvel. Varda explores the tension between objective & subjective time. We’ve all experienced this where 30 minutes can feel like an eternity, or hours can slip by without notice. The film is objectively 90 minutes long, but Cleo’s experience of that time is variable. There are moments where she disassociates, allowing the narrative to become another’s. However, this is her story, and the test results have the potential to reshape her entire life. I got such a palpable sense of a person trying not to overthink about their own mortality, something that would hit pretty hard when you are young. Even in my early 40s, I have lived a fortunate life and never had severe health issues. I know one day, as I age that will not be the case, and I will have hours like Cleo’s, waiting in dread, desperate for a distraction.

Varda loves to use mirrors in her work, and even in this early piece, that is evident. The mirrors serve a few purposes. The first is that they force Cleo to regard herself; she looks at her youth & beauty and thinks about how it is promised to fade in time. With the pendulum of cancer swinging above her head, Cleo tries not to think about the treatments that must kill a part of one’s body to save the whole, the loss of hair & weight, becoming a walking husk for a time. She also contemplates the treatments not working and dying a young woman in the middle of pursuing her passion. 

I also saw the mirrors as pointing out the absence in the world if Cleo were to die. Varda clearly spent a considerable amount of time making sure the mirrors’ angles lined up perfectly with the camera. When Cleo steps behind a mirror, we glimpse a world without her, only for the young woman to emerge from the other side. Death is an absence, a person cut out of the picture forever, those left behind living in the wake of that void. Cleo’s physical form is also an illusion, part of the marketing of her pop singer persona. At the halfway mark, she pulls off her hair, revealed to be a wig, and becomes a different person. Even Cleo isn’t her real name. People will remember the death of Cleo Victorie, but how many will think of Florence? Cleopatra, her namesake, is an idea of a person few even know much about despite being so famous.

The turning point in the film occurs during her regularly scheduled rehearsal, something she obviously doesn’t care about right now. She sings a new song brought to her that has themes of loss & decay within it. That triggers a transformation in her thinking that informs the rest of the picture. She wants to live life fuller, but Cleo needs help figuring out how to do that. She realizes she hasn’t really felt love before, but can she find it in such a tiny sliver of time? She may have found this in the soldier Antoine, facing down his mortality as he’s shipped out to Algeria the following day. 

In a sequence recalling Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Cleo & Antoine desperately try to make the minutes they share matter. But they don’t know how to do that. The doctor is out when they arrive at the hospital. Perhaps Cleo has been given a stay of execution. Then, as the couple talk in the park, the doctor pulls up, having seen Cleo from afar. He delivers his news. The two people who receive it stand there in silence. The camera, standing in for the perspective of the doctor’s car, zips away. The couple walks together. Time has stopped. They are frozen at this moment. They want to do or say something profound. There are no words. They look at each other. This is all they have.