France, 1962, 93 mins., Color, Later Black & White, 1:33:00, French.
The clash between the Nouvelle Vague principles and the creator’s unique feminist agenda, resulted in a rare choice to maintain the Unity of Time in this film, and in the strictest way. Cleo 5 to 7 depicts the whereabouts of its protagonist over the exactly same 1 hour and 30 minutes as the movie is. Most viewers and commentators would see this as a way of letting us feel we are kind of participants in a real-time event, that this choice contributes greatly to the sense of authenticity the French New Wave preached for. But this is not a fly-on-the-wall unobtrusive documentary and Agnès Varda, the director, incorporated many other choices that seem to interrupt and contradict this particular first impression of what is real and true.
Tarkovsky’s much later film Stalker (1979) ends with a five-minutes or so color sequence, as if we are thrown back to the reality after our imagined or dream-like journey, while here, the movie starts in 5 minutes or so color sequence , ie in the real world, as much as the occurrence depicted in it, Tarot readings, can be taken as Truths, before transitioning to black and white and maybe becoming a dream-like journey of escaping death. This is an introduction. Only the cards and the voice-over inconclusive interpretation presented to us in color, the interaction with the fortune teller thereafter is in black and white. And still the first episode title appears only after the fortune teller closes the door after Cleo. Only after she opens the door to the adjacent room where her husband is her, telling him her client who just left, she is doomed (in a wonderful New Wave characteristic one sequence). After the titles, we see women in line for a reading. Now, instead of grim reality, it is presented as a social norm. A New Wave characteristic sequence of Jump-Cuts represents the moment our beautiful heroine truly grasps her serious situation. Or the other way around, her decision to escape it no matter how.
Cleo goes out to the busy streets of Paris. The characteristic outdoor shooting scenes were turned here into a kind of time traveling, not just because the film maintains the unity of time but because when you think you are facing death, the perception of time and how to spend it may change radically. In an interview, Varda mentioned her concern with objective (real) time vs. subjective time in the film, where objective time is represented by clocks or by the news on the radio (stating the time), while subjective time is conveyed through the characters perceptions and fears, as when they stressed they have no time and two minutes later , they have all the time in the world ( see here, as of 16:42 ). Varda tricks time, as her heroine tries to. There are 13 episodes in this film, heralded by titles (another new wavish thing, after Brecht I takes over), but their lengths are not uniform. And they are alternating between outer characters and the heroine character.
Cléo – 17:05-17:08 – 3mins.
Angèle – 17:08-17:13 – 5mins.
Cléo – 17:13 -17:18 – 5mins.
Angèle – 17:18-17:25 – 7mins.
Cléo – 17:25-17:31 – 6mins.
Bob – 17:31-17:38 – 7mins.
Cléo – 17:38-17:45 – 7mins.
(in which Cléo transforms)
Quelques Autres (some others) – 17:45-17:52 – 7mins.
Dorothée – 17:52-18:00 – 8mins.
Raoul – 18:00-18:04 – 4mins.
(with the film within the film with Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina)
Cléo – 18:04-18:12 - 8mins.
(mirror breaks just before the title)
Antoine – 18:12-18:15 – 3 mins.
Cléo et Antoine – 18:15-18:30 – 15 mins.
- Cléo – 17:05-17:08 – 3mins.
- Angèle – 17:08-17:13 – 5mins.
- Cléo – 17:13 -17:18 – 5mins
- Angèle – 17:18-17:25 – 7mins.
- Cléo – 17:25-17:31 – 6mins.
- Bob – 17:31-17:38 – 7mins.
- Cléo – 17:38-17:45 – 7mins. (in which Cleo transforms)
- Quelques Autres (some others) – 17:45-17:52 – 7mins.
- Dorothée – 17:52-18:00 – 8mins.
- Raoul – 18:00-18:04 – 4mins. (with the film within the film with Jean-Luc Godard and Ana Carina)
- Cléo – 18:04-18:12 -8mins (mirror breaks just before the title)
- Antoine – 18:12-18:15 – 3 mins
- Cléo et Antoine – 18:15-18:30 – 15 mins.
Is it about alternating points of view. Interestingly enough, the episode titled ‘Some Others’ focuses mainly on the heroine that seems to be lost among the crowd, the others, that are displayed through her eyes but she is kind of invisible to them. It kind of reminds me the crowd Jean Vigo portrayed in About Nice (1929). After her transformation, she still puts on dark glasses, as would Godard in the film within the film (that Cleo and Dorothee watch from the screening booth, in which Raoul, Dorothee’s partner, works). It’s not clear though, if she uses it to mask herself, only nobody seem to care, so she takes them off, or like Godard in the film within the film, they are used to darken reality, just like, in effect, the looking glasses. In fact, Varda tends to surround her heroine in black, like when she sings Sans Toi (without you) against the dark curtain of her wardrobe, to emphasize her existential loneliness, although the room is full of people. This is just before Cleo takes a turn and transforms, Varda said it is exactly after 45 minutes, exactly in the middle of the film. She says goodbye to the wig and the mirrors altogether (and symbolically the wig lands on the frame of its counterpart, the mirror), the masks she puts upon herself (echoed in the frightening masks she sees in shop’s windows while at the cab) and the will to fulfil other people’s wishes, of being a slave to the way she is reflected by and to others.
Cleo, a pop star in the making, a strive-to-be-perfect doll-like representation of herself, embraces outer expectations, be it societal norms or the wishes of her team and ungrateful lover whom she is so eager to please, as if her existence depends on it, as if, as long as she still looks beautiful she won’t die. Waiting for test results of a biopsy, fearing stomach cancer (an illness that luckily won’t hurt her looks), she embarks on a self-liberating journey to find her true self (as much as this is plausible), resurfaces her true identity, Florance, and ultimately, comes to terms with her own mortality.
Movement is another true character of the movie. Or more precisely, its pace. It is the dolly movement of the New Wave camera, which replaces traditional cuts, that allows Varda to convey her heroine’s turbulent inner self. Darkness and movement are joined in the scene where, while at a car, Cleo and Dorothee enter a tunnel with a dolly (thus darkening the entire screen for a while) to mimic their ongoing conversation, which suddenly deals with the gravity of Cleo’s illness and her fear of death. At first Cleo sees the world passing quickly by her while at cabs. It’s full of scary masks. After she transforms, she takes a walk (an unusual thing for her, as Dorothee testified) and we see the people staring or mostly ignoring her, from her own point of view. She puts one of her songs in the jukebox at café Dome, she tells Dorothee, but nobody react to it. Before, while at a cab, one of her songs was played on the radio, the female drivers liked it, but Cleo said it was badly recorded and that she hates it, if only for the driver to understand it is her who sings it. She has an attention problem. Maybe she enjoys being harassed, when two youngsters in a passing car ask her if she lives with her parents… Dorothee, a nude model, treats exposure rather differently and portrayed as a much more independent woman who also drives a car (although it’s of and for her boyfriend) and declares what she wants, i.e. signals with her own hands of her will to take a turn in this old car lacking light signalling. She even asks Cleo to make such a signal when needed. In the background, we see trains passing (horizontally) behind the vertical line in which our heroines’ car goes, smoke from a chimney, the end of a tunnel, even a waterfall is seen from the bridge on which she meets Antoine. Strangely, this bridge rail is twisted, like branches of a tree or roots.
The dreamy aspect of this movie becomes clearer and clearer as it moves toward its end, when destiny is once again a concern. Cleo accidently meets her mirrored reflection in the park in the form of Antoine, a soldier on vacation from the Algerian war, who seems to be as doomed as she is. The greenish garden was turned kind of white by a special green filter used by the photographer, Varda explained in an interview, giving the scenery a look on the verge of the unreal. Who is she… Cleo, her manufactured alter-ego or Florance, an entity she is no longer connected to. Real mirrors, looking glasses, even the broken, distorted ones shown after her transformation, or her twisted reflection in the water, disappear when her subjective human reflection appears, a talkative person contemplating his existential crisis, which mirrors the one she experiences. And then comes the long-awaited biopsy results, conveyed to her in a casual unceremonious gesture, when the doctor, on his way home, after being told she is looking for him, after she waived on the chance of getting them on that day, passes by her and Antoine in his car and simply says it would be solved by two months of radiations. Not as if she won’t die eventually (she probably will, as will Antoine), but as if it is no longer important. As if dreaming of the right mirror is the most important thing in life. And maybe it is. As you might say, a person’s perception of themselves is based still on the way they are outwardly perceived.
So, do you really truthfully perceive the Real just before death as Rilke described it in the Eighth Elegy of the Duino Elegies, and what does it have to do with Self-Image, Beauty and Vocation or sense of Purpose. Is Success a code of conduct or a way of grasping yourself or others. When we speak of Subjectivity, of subjective time, is it simply a way of perceiving time or is it a way to perceive, to characterize a subject. And what about clothes, wigs or the choice to go natural, are they just different personas, masks, one imposes upon oneself for being able to socialize, or are they different aspects of the subject.
Changing into a robe (aided by her assistant Angele) while hanging in mid-air, performing some exercises on the bar, despite feeling extremely sick, is both hilarious and upon further reflection, quite appalling, as it designates unrealistic, excessive and truly unnecessary effort, one is willing to undertake in order to fit an idealized image of the way one should behave, look and jangle between tasks. It’s like she’s a little miss perfect doll aimed only to serve your wildest fantasies. Because, as you know, myths don’t get sick. But she is a caricature of a love goddess with her big white flappy gown – in which she sways back and forth on a swing in front of a pair of wings hanging on the wall behind her…
The image of Cleo the love goddess in the big robe reminded me of this other movie, Fellini’s Giulietta degli Spiriti (1965), which also features a larger-than-life, doll-like, voluptuous neighbour named Suzy as a mirror to a real woman, his wife, practically an extension of himself. The message Suzy brings to her is one of liberation. Being merely a reflection and thus, unlike Cleo, the ultimate fantasy, she can go down the slide to take a swim in the nude in the underground pool (the inner self), while Cleo is terrified of being exposed. While Suzy hosts hedonistic orgies, our Gulietta escapes them, only to go home and wait for her unfaithful husband, as it is the only way she knows. Does that reversal of roles mean that Fellini is telling his wife to follow the stereotype of the perfect devoted wife or totally the other way around: that she needs to regain her adventurous, liberated self that she may have lost trying so hard to conform. Oddly enough, Cleo like Gulietta, seek refuge to their problems in spiritualism (Gulietta tries Séance and seeks the advice of a strange looking guru), in fantasy, and in surreal and dream-like encounters. You just can’t deny the dreamy aspect of Cleo 5 to 7.
A completely different aspect of Cleo 5 to 7 is also examined in the play and movie Hair (1968, 1979), especially in the movie version, where the main protagonist, an innocent Oklahoma lad with a patriotic upbringing, comes to the big city of NYC to spend his last hours before enlisting to serve in the Vietnam war, where he will most likely die. This text confronts the idea of scarifying oneself for the collective good with the young people it sentences to death. Is it your duty to serve your country or should you take care of your own rights as conveyed by the flower power of the anti-war counterculture movement. As Cleo escapes the constraints of society norms to find her own self and liberate herself, here the non-conformist Berger sacrifices himself not for his country, not for the collective, as the “collective good” in regard to this war remains unclear and highly debateable, but for his friend Claude so he can be liberated too, through love, and reunited with his girlfriend. Berger’s death was not deliberate, as he did not intend to take his friend’s place, willing to die instead of him. Rather, it happened due to a pointless mistake, and thus Berger’s act, more than everything, symbolizes a completely needless scarification that goes beyond any agreed-upon principles of friendly or collective altruism. Getting back to our Cleo, one might ask whom she thinks she serves by imposing the role of Cleo upon Florance. This, however, goes beyond the scope of this review…
