Movie Monday: Film Recommendations By Our Contributors
The place is Paris in the early 1960s. Algeria is fighting for independence, the philosophy of existentialism has been thriving for 20 years, and the French ‘New Wave’ is in its heyday. A relatively new face in filmmaking, Agnès Varda, decides to create what she calls “a portrait of a woman painted onto a documentary about Paris.” Et voilà! Cléo From 5 To 7 is born.
Cléo from 5 to 7 follows a young successful singer as she wanders Paris between the hours of 5pm and 7pm waiting to hear the result of a test for stomach cancer. In these two hours, her life completely changes as she battles with this sense of mortality and reevaluates the life she has. We see Cléo (Corinne Marchand) begin the film as a vain, impetulant poster girl for the female stereotype. And yet after these two hours we leave her as someone entirely different.
I was first introduced to this film at the University of Cambridge, in my first year of French and Spanish. We studied works from all across history so that we could find our niche and specialise further down the line. Cléo from 5 to 7 was the French 20th-century item on the list. As a state-school kid in a very privileged classroom, the fact that somewhere like Cambridge was telling me to watch this film only cemented my judgement that French cinema was for the elite. However, it was writing about this black-and-white art film where I felt most on equal footing with everyone else because, for once, it was new to all of us. I chose to write about it in my first-year exams and it motivated me to specialise in European Cinema. After that, I included it in my third-year dissertation. It’s the one text that has stuck with me throughout my degree and it still remains one of my favourites.
Part One: Baudelaire Made Feminist
Cléo and Paris are the mirrored protagonists of this film. As Cléo begins to re-examine oppressive social conventions, the city begins to stop enforcing them. The two work in a cycle and show the ways in which women who accept misogynistic standards around beauty and appearance impress them on others; the judgements on how everything ‘must look.’ Cléo even admits “I always think everyone is looking at me, but I only look at myself,” which may as well be the Instagram tagline.
Cléo is made into a ‘wallflower’ character that wanders and observes the world around them; a character type that, interestingly, was invented in a time of literary rebellion in 19th-century France. Charles Baudelaire wrote the flâneur in his poetry as a character who wandered without purpose, just watching and conveying what he saw. Not quite a wallflower, the flâneur is pretty happy where they are; purposeless, but able to see what others can’t. Varda, inspired by this and the recurring trend of auteur cinema, championed cinécriture (cine-writing) and made Cléo a flâneur herself.
Varda’s flâneur (or flâneuse, being the first woman to inhabit the role) is possibly the most feminist statement she makes in this entire film. Cléo perfectly shows the most fundamental difference in observing the world as a woman. We don’t get the luxury of existing and observing without being observed back. Varda acknowledges that, and you just have to sit there and accept it in real time.
Part Two: Dances With Death
Cléo spends the film waiting for the results of her test for terminal cancer so, as you can imagine, the film grapples with death and mortality quite a lot, especially in conjunction with beauty. For Cléo, beauty is life and ugliness isn’t worth living for. However as the film progresses she begins to redirect her focus from her outsides to the outside world, and reexamines the stock she places in societal beauty standards. From heroin-chic to the rise of the BBL, it is no less common today to make a choice between your appearance and your life.
More than focusing on Cléo’s potential illness, however, Varda puts this in conversation with those facing death in the Algerian War. Varda compares the deaths of soldiers with Cléo’s threatening illness. In doing so, she highlights just how avoidable the tragedies of that war were, and this rings just as true 60 years later. France only apologised for these atrocities in 2021 and the fight for decolonisation is nowhere near over. To this day, France is experiencing an ongoing rise in right-wing politics that is, in large parts, due to racism against migrants from colonised countries and beyond.
In short, this film takes the time to explore what we die for as well as what we live for, and right now understanding what we want to live for feels more vital than ever.
Part Three: Nobody Understands Me!
If feminism and existential crises aren’t enough to convince you to watch this film, I have one final argument up my sleeve; the melodrama!
Cleo from 5 to 7 follows a young, successful singer grappling with an identity crisis and looking stunning while she does so. The costumes, wigs and hats are all a feast for the eyes (Cléo has a lot of costume changes in two hours!) and Marchand does an excellent job of making sad look pretty.
Varda forces a strict split between the exterior and the interior in all senses of the word. Cléo’s external persona differs completely from her internal monologues. Her inner circle treats her so differently to the world around her and we’re left feeling Cléo’s frustration as she begins to blur those lines and finds that nobody really understands her.
This all culminates in a melodramatic musical number, Sans toi. The song is composed by Michel Legrand, the man behind the score for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Cléo gives one final plea to her inner circle that she depends upon so dearly, before truly beginning to change in the face of death. It is grandiose, spotlit and a fantastic display of those same feelings we now attribute to teen angst and emo culture. It is the explosion of emotions that boil down to being misunderstood in a society that loves to form pre-judgements.
Cléo from 5 to 7 was my first introduction to a cinematic movement that I had expected to be about nothing more than the aesthetically depressing vibes. But I have gotten a lot out of this film in the past four years and I hope this little love letter to Agnès Varda will convince you to do the same.
Words by Alex Oxford
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