Agnès Varda – ‘Cleo from 5 to 7’
In the late 1950s, a desire to revitalise filmmaking and push the medium to new boundaries spawned a movement that would change cinema forever – the French New Wave. Male directors, such as Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, dominated the period, portraying a rather androcentric view of the world. However, Agnès Varda, the only female director of the French New Wave, pioneered a distinctively feminine cinematic gaze that is encapsulated in her second feature, Cleo from 5 to 7.
Released in 1962, the film is a landmark of feminist filmmaking and one of the definitive releases of the French New Wave. It follows a singer named Cleo (Corrine Marchand) between the hours of five and seven in the evening as she anxiously awaits the results of a test which will determine whether she has cancer. The film opens with a tarot card sequence, Varda’s lens focusing on the cards before revealing Cleo’s face. When the tarot reader pulls out worrying cards, the lucid colour film stock turns to black-and-white, indicating Cleo’s fears by literally removing all the colour from her life.
As Cleo walks down the stairs, taking in her fleeting mortality, Varda cleverly employs POV shots to emphasise her instability, focusing on cracking walls and the expanse of outside through a nearby window. Varda even repeats a close-up of Cleo’s face several times to disorient the viewer before framing her in a mirror. Reflections become a significant motif from the get-go, signalling the character’s preoccupation with beauty. She says to herself, “Hold on, pretty butterfly. Ugliness is a kind of death. As long as I’m beautiful, I’m more alive than others.”
Rather than framing Cleo’s narcissism with judgement, Varda allows it to play a central role in her character, a barometer with which to judge her progress over the course of the evening. It signifies her reliance on beauty and outward appearance as the key to survival as a woman in a patriarchal world, and her occupation as a singer reflects her reliance on performance in every facet of her life. The idea that gender is performed, championed by theorists such as Judith Butler, is explored through Cleo’s obsession with appearing feminine and beautiful. Through Cleo, Varda comments on the demands placed on women to adhere to certain patriarchal social norms, which become tiring to carry out continuously. Men frequently glance at Cleo, or mirrors frame her from more than one angle at once, highlighting the idea that women are constantly surveyed.
Not only is she framed as narcissistic, but she is also childish and spoilt, with her assistant, Angele, referring to her as “my little girl”. Yet, following a dramatic rendition of ‘Sans toi’ at her house, wearing an opulent fluffy white dressing gown, everything changes for Cleo. A single tear rolls down her cheek as she sings, “Beauty wasted/ Naked in the cold of winter/ Just a yearning body/ Without you”. Varda slowly zooms in so that Cleo is framed by an entirely black backdrop, emphasising the importance of this revelatory moment. From here, she decides to step back out onto the streets and wander around Paris, but without the assistance of Angele or her wig. Instead, she dons a smart black dress as if she is already mourning her potential death and heads out.
Over the course of the next hour, Varda fills the film with an incredible amount of symbolism, emerging from every corner of the screen. Her ability to use a distant taxi radio to add commentary about the Algerian war or an African mask in a shop window to connote colonialism and reflect Cleo’s preoccupation with performance and ‘mask-wearing’ indicates the strength of Varda’s filmmaking skills. As Cleo wanders aimlessly, meets up with a friend, and watches a short film, she slowly confronts the intricacies of everyday life, finding substance beyond beauty and performance. Her anxieties surrounding the potential decay of her beauty begin to subside as she comes to terms with her mortality, reflected in the last image we see of a mirror – a smashed one. Cleo’s eye is framed in one of the shards as she says, “It’s an omen of death”. Yet she ultimately decides not to pick up the pieces, leaving them fragmented on the ground.
As Cleo wanders some more, she meets a sensitive soldier, Antoine, and instantly connects with him, finding solace in the company of another. The pair discuss death and war, with Cleo revealing that her real name is Florence before Antoine accompanies her to receive her test results. In the end, the doctor casually drives past Cleo and tells her she’ll need to have two months of chemotherapy, but she should be fine. Just like that, Cleo’s anxieties are confirmed, yet she doesn’t burst into tears or act out. Instead, she smiles at Antoine and says, “I’ve the feeling my fear has gone. I’ve the feeling I’m happy.”
Cleo finds happiness by discarding the rigid acts of performance expected of her, with Varda suggesting that life would be much more freeing for women if they didn’t have to adhere to the expectations laid out by men. With that, her happiness comes from an acceptance of life’s shortness yet the joy that can be found in the simplicities of every day, such as visiting a friend or hitting it off with a stranger and potentially finding love. By the film’s end, Cleo is no longer the narcissistic and self-obsessed woman we meet at the beginning – she is Florence. The film charts her journey of self-acceptance and discovery, and she is ultimately liberated by her diagnosis. It allows her to focus her attention away from the superficialities of life that she was so reliant on before.
Varda imbues a bleak topic with hopefulness and optimism, all while commenting on relevant social issues of the period, from the expectations of women to the ongoing Algerian war and French colonialism. Her rich visual language and use of time as a narrative structure have inspired filmmakers for decades since, and Cleo from 5 to 7 remains one of the greatest films about the expectations of womanhood.
