Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)

 Agnes Varda's "Cleo from 5 to 7"

In 1962, Agnes Varda completed her second feature film, "Cleo from 5 to 7," a full 7 years after her directorial debut, "La Pointe Courte." Notably, "La Pointe Courte" was the film, in my opinion, that single-handedly ignited the French New Wave film movement. After setting such a precedent, I was highly anticipating viewing Varda's second attempt. She did not disappoint and even elevated the bar even further. 

The film centers on a contemporary French pop star named Cleo, during the hours of 5 pm to roughly 7 pm. She spends these few hours awaiting the results of a medical exam. She traverses the city, meets people, and attempts to reconnect with her own sense of self in the process.

A completely simple premise, however Varda somehow creates magic with it. When we begin the film with Cleo, Varda demonstrates this pop star's superficiality and her spoiled nature. Right from the onset, we view Cleo as a superstitious person through her visit to a fortune teller. After leaving the fortune teller, Cleo begins her odyssey through the streets of Paris. Varda makes sure to blend Cleo's frivolous and superficial nature in congruency to her surroundings. Paris is full of entertainment, ads, and many other assortment of surface-level superficiality. In this way, part of the film's themes remind me of Jean-Luc Godard's "Vivre Sa Vie," released the same year. Varda completely links Cleo to this modernity. Is is through this exterior world that Cleo, and perhaps society as a whole, is obsessed with surface-level beauty. This is part of the reason why Cleo is nervous about cancer treatment. She is afraid of losing her hair or becoming 'ugly' in the eyes of others. Society has instructed her that her only value is her feminine beauty. Once that is taken away, who will she be?

Varda makes us aware of this superficiality through the contrasting to this glossy Paris to the real-world events we hear on the radio Cleo listens to from her taxi ride. While traversing the streets of a modern and beautiful Paris, the world is full of terrorism, war, and other typically horrifying news. The real world is ugly and brutal and yet Varda's vision of Paris and her protagonist Cleo is beautiful. Cleo is able to momentarily escape this momentary reminder of brutality once she gets back to her apartment. Her apartment, as Varda paints it, is like a princess' chamber. A white-on-white lair with a canopy bed becomes a beautiful stage for an at-home pop star. With her apartment room, Cleo is able to retreat back to the graces of beauty and comfort. She has some musicians come over to help her arrange a new song and even these playful and fun musicians are a comfort to her as well as we begin to see her more relaxed side. 

However, Cleo reaches a breaking point and suddenly shifts into another gear. With her glossy princess-esque room and her playfully comforting bandmates, she was able to momentarily take a respite from facing reality. However, she decides to go back into the city. She initiates this recourse by taking off her wig. By removing this piece of artifice, she reconstitutes herself as a human being and ventures back out, away from her typical comforts. As Molly Haskel writes in her 2000 Criterion essay of the film, "with this symbolic gesture, she becomes more inquisitive, more aware of the world outside her."

At first, she hesitantly retreats back to superficiality by playing one of her songs on a local cafe's jukebox. However, as she observes the people around her, she notices that no one is taking any interest in the music and, in fact, many actively dislike it. With this sudden ego fracture, she continues on her odyssey of connecting with the world outside of herself. She spends the rest of the film engaging in connection. She meets up with a friend who happens to model naked for sculptors. She asks the friend how she could be so vulnerable, to which the friend discusses the concept of loving yourself and all your naked imperfections. She goes with the friend to catch a glimpse of a silent film, starring a cameo appearance by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. She then goes to the Bois-du-Boulogne and meets a talkative serviceman whose intellectual curiosity disarms her. As Hasket states of this situation, "he has no idea who she is, and in his engaging company, she is taken outside of herself, gradually entering into a world of real human exchange." 

From the hours of 5 to 7, Cleo goes from superficial concerns to actually stepping outside of her shallow concerns and engages with the world in a meaningful way. Despite the cancer diagnosis in the end, she reveals that she is no longer scared. Varda ends the film with Cleo accepting that which will come her way. Varda's vision of Cleo is that of a modern woman's potential journey. Because the world infuses you with a sense of superficiality and beauty standards, the typical modern woman's sense of self-worth inextricably becomes tied to her appearance. Throughout the film, Varda has Cleo consistently encounter a Paris full of mirrors. Self-appearance is paramount in this modern world. As Cleo navigates the streets, Varda shows a people walking down the street constantly staring at her. Because the camera is utilized as Cleo's POV, the bystanders are always staring at us the viewer. Varda provides the viewer with the typical female viewpoint, that of constant eyes and attention. The appearance of the female becomes the primary focal point of society. By the end of the film, Cleo has come to step outside of herself and reconnected with herself as a human being and not someone completely tied to beauty and perception as a primary mode of being. In a climatic near-ending scene, Cleo happens upon a mirror that has been broken. The re-discover of herself has allowed her to break away from superficial standards and reinvigorated her with the comfort and love she has for herself as a human being and the natural world around her.

"Cleo from 5 to 7" is not only a feminist masterpiece showing a woman's transition to self-worth, but it also is applicable to every single person of modernity. Our modern, surface-level post-war world is nothing but self-soothing superficial treatments to a modern malaise. Varda's film is an odyssey to rediscovering the depth of one's self and the treatment that human connection has to self discovery.