Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961)
Directed by Agnès Varda

Film Review

Agnès Varda's second full-length film, and probably her most highly rated work, is one of the defining films of the French New Wave.  Like many of her Nouvelle Vague contemporaries, Varda combines a direct, almost documentary style of film-making with an intensely humanist perspective, whilst bringing in wider political concerns of the day (here, reference to the increasingly fruitless war between France and Algeria).

Corinne Marchand's mesmerising performance as Cléo captures the anxiety of a self-centred woman who suddenly realises she may be about to lose everything.  Varda being one of the few female film directors of the New Wave, the film has a distinctively female perspective, and shows female vulnerability perhaps more convincingly than most other film directors of this period.  With its fluid photography, in expressive black-and-white, the film has a timeless, poetic quality, which works well with its sense of tragic realism.

The film includes a sequence in which Cléo watches a silent black and white film, a witty allegory in which New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard appears with Anna Karina.  This is perhaps one indulgence which jars, providing an awkward break in the flow of the film.   In the latter half of the film, Cléo's supposed cancer is contrasted with the real malaise of the Algerian war, a daring gesture on the part of Varda (risking the film being banned by the censors). Varda followed this with two similarly off-kilter films in which she further developed her idiosyncratic style of filmmaking: Le Bonheur (1965) and Les Créatures (1966).

Film Synopsis

Paris, 1960.  Cléo is an attractive younger singer who is anxiously awaiting the results of a medical examination.  She has already convinced herself that she has cancer and will soon die from the disease, so she thinks morbid thoughts over the next two hours as she drifts without purpose around the capital.  A visit to a fortune teller appears to confirm who gravest concerns and not even a meeting with her lover can take her mind off the death sentence that will soon be pronounced by her doctor.  She visits her friend Dorothée, who is posing for a nude portrait, and then drops in on Raoul, a projectionist who shows her a black comedy.  With her time nearly up, Cléo is walking across a park when she notices Antoine, a young man in a uniform she has never met before.  Doubtless he is off to start his military service in Algeria.  It is in this stranger that Cléo confides her fear of dying.  Comforted, she returns to her doctor to hear what Fate has decided for her...