Cleo from 5 to 7

[osprey_archer]

Agnes Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 covers two hours in the life of Cleo, a singer in Paris who is waiting to hear from her doctor about a potentially fatal diagnosis. (The movie is actually only an hour and a half long; we skip some travel time in there somewhere.) The movie is perhaps as interesting as the things it doesn’t do as the things it does: you might expect meditations on the meaning of life, contemplation about the meaning of death, or at least a life-changing epiphany, but these things happen only in oblique shards.

Instead, Cleo simply wanders, sometimes succumbing to tears as her fears overcome her, sometimes masking her terror in irritation and snapping at the composers who write her songs - and sometimes, briefly, setting aside the sense of impending doom that hangs above her, smiling at herself in the mirror as she tries on new hats.

The movie abounds in these moments of distraction. Not only millinery shops but cafes, mirrors, street performers (including a man who eats live frogs), a silent movie within the movie, all swirl around Cleo as she moves through the streets of Paris. I suspect you could learn quite a bit about Paris in the 1960s just by watching this movie.

I feel that I ought to have something more to say about it, because I did like it, although it didn’t grab at my soul the way Vagabond did; but the film is so dependent on visuals, or rather on the accretion of visual details, many of which seem so small in themselves, that it’s hard to find a way into writing about it. It’s worth seeing, though; I have the feeling that all of Agnes Varda’s films are worth seeing. We’ll see how many I can get my hands on.

Comments

[asakiyume]

What sorts of shards do you end up getting? You said oblique, so I'm guessing she doesn't say stuff directly in conversation. Is it just what we the viewers intuit, watching her?

[osprey_archer]

She does say a few things directly in conversation - and a couple of times, very briefly, in voiceover - but the conversations are just conversations, not philosophical dialogues like in something like Before Sunrise.

So you get a little insight into what she's thinking, and then the conversation drifts off on the topic of hats or whatever - rambling the way that conversations do. You get the feeling that what Cleo's sharing, even in voiceover, is just the tip of the iceberg to what she's thinking underneath.

[kore]

I have the feeling that all of Agnes Varda’s films are worth seeing.

DEFINITELY.

I saw this one long ago, on one of those Bravo fests they used to have where they aired a lot of films by one director, and honestly don't remember much about it. But Varda is always worth watching, yeah.

[osprey_archer]

So many of her films are so hard to track down! We'll see how it goes, I suppose.