So elegant, so stylish, so extremely and eternally cool. In broad strokes Agnès Varda’s second feature film sounds like a downer: Cléo Victoire (Corinne Marchand), a singer in Paris, nervously awaits the results of a biopsy. In more specific terms it sounds rather uneventful: unfolding in real-time, Cléo spends her day faffing about – going to a cafe, trying on clothes, hanging out in her apartment with friends, walking the streets, catching cabs. But the sheer delightfulness of Cléo from 5 to 7 comes down to execution, its form and aesthetic born from the coolest cinema movement of them all: the French New Wave, to which the legendary Varda was a key contributor.
The amazing film noir genre of the 40s and 50s competes with the FNW in coolness and sass, with bangin’ crime stories and a more unified aesthetic. But the French rabble rousers (many of whom started out as critics) tossed out the rulebook and radicalised the medium’s form and grammar, rocking its foundations and injecting into cinematic storytelling wild new possibilities. Cléo from 5 to 7 is one of the breezier New Wave classics, cosmopolitan to the core, tuned to the buzz and thrum of the city – which is Paris circa the early 60s. C’est magnifique!
It begins in colour, with overhead shots of tarot cards that these days might be compared to the work of Wes Anderson. Once Cléo receives a grim (albeit non-medical) prognosis – the soothsayer proclaiming “the illness is upon you” as the singer draws the death card – the film switches to monochrome and follows Cléo out of the room. Just before she exits the building, Varda inserts one of several shots of mirrors, used in part to infer the protagonist’s sadness is wrapped up in her beauty and vanity.
“As long as I’m beautiful, I’m alive,” she says via internal monologue as she observes herself – but this isn’t the look of a person happy to be either of those things. On the street, Cléo walks past various businesses and people, and this is where the cosmopolitan delights kick in.
The film’s 90-minute runtime (which contradicts the title – perhaps “Cléo from 5 to 6.30” doesn’t have the same ring to it) reveals different aspects of the richness and breadth of the city experience. There are trams and traffic; people getting in the way and people keeping out of it; bohemians on one corner, businesspeople the next; and the protagonist’s ritzy apartment – which for some reason has a swing in it.
“People die suddenly nowadays – especially artists,” Cléo observes, while rocking forwards and backwards on that silly swing. A lover visits, then two friends, congregating around the piano to play, sing and smoke (a legal requirement for being French, surely). But Cléo’s mood sours and she sends them out. Various people come and go, but it feels like a stretch to describe any of them as side or supporting characters; this is Cléo’s film through and through.
At almost exactly the halfway mark, when Cléo visits Le Dôme cafe (known for attracting clientele including Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway), Varda switches to first-person perspective to navigate the space, the camera now acting as the protagonist’s eyes. Varda deploys so many different techniques, potentially so clashing and discordant, that it’s amazing the experience feels tonally consistent. The camera is stationary, the camera roams; the cuts are quick, the takes are long; the frame pauses to soak up the faces of some people and whizzes by others.
Cléo from 5 to 7 is divided into 13 chapters, which is the only touch I don’t particularly like, the sum of its parts so wonderfully melodic and cohesive. It’s rare for a film so lovely and elegant to roll out lines like: “I might as well be dead already.” Yet so much about this film is exquisitely rare, including the way time itself unfolds, as one long fluid moment, a classic example of the “real-time” concept.
Films are sometimes described as being like time capsules or mausoleums – but watching this one, which is always in the here-and-now, one hour for the protagonist equalling one hour for us, is more like entering a portal.
On the other side of it we arrive in Paris in the 60s, with Cléo Victoire as our beautiful, sad guide. There’s not the slightest hint of the film overstaying its welcome. We could watch her ambling around for hours; this joyous exercise in elegance and style never gets old.
