Perhaps the most delightfully feather-light film to take mortality as its central preoccupation. As she waits to hear the results of a medical exam and strongly suspecting she's about to be diagnosed with fatal cancer, a successful, beautiful singer (Corinne Marchand) navigates the streets, cafes and shops of Paris.
It's late afternoon on the longest day of the year; the day is sunny, the pavements crowded, but no matter where she goes, Cleo is haunted by superstition and fate. And the inescapable importance of destiny is indicated from the outset: the film is in black-and-white, but there's a prologue in colour in which our heroine is shown visiting a tarot-reader (and whose very first shot, an overhead survey of the tarot table, eerily prefigures the closing credits of The Masque of the Red Death.)
Marchand is luminous and radiant - most of the time. But the bulb of instinctive, self-satisfied optimism within her has a faulty, flickering filament that sends frowns spreading over her "doll-like" features. Cleo isn't the deepest or most articulate of protagonists – of all the characters in the picture (Dominique Davray is splendidly direct as her no-nonsense maid/PA Angèle), she's arguably the least interesting on view.
She does, however, go on some kind of halting internal journey towards self-knowledge – in tandem with her speedier physical peregrinations around the various arrondissements: documentary-style sequences of giddily atmospheric street-life during which Varda captures hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Parisians going about their business (their propensity to look directly into the camera excused by Cleo's considerable fame and head-turning loveliness.)
These semi-aimless wanderings make her a not-so-distant cousin of Jeanne Moreau's somewhat more driven flaneuse from Lift to the Scaffold. Indeed, it's a little surprising that writer-director didn't have Moreau pop up in character as an in-joke - this would certainly have fit with the silent short-film-within-the-film which Cleo watches from a cinema projection-booth, which rib-nudgingly features several key Nouvelle vague figures as very game slapstick participants.
Although it's usually labelled as part of the parallel Rive Gauche movement rather than strictly being an example of Nouvelle vague, Cleo does feature a couple of NV touches – most notably its somewhat arbitrary division into short chapters via titles that flash onto the screen, identifying the precise time and identifying key characters. It's debatable whether this technique adds very much, rather it serves to lift us out of an airy experience which is at its best immersive, intoxicating – and occasionally even ecstatic, as when Varda closes right in on Cleo's face as she tries out a sad new chanson in her opulent apartment, and the spare solo-piano accompaniment imperceptibly gives way to a full, heart-rending orchestral score.
Neil Young
13th November 2009
CLEO FROM 5 TO 7
8/10
Cléo de 5 í 7
Fr 1962
directed by Agnès Varda
93m (BBFC)
[21/28]
seen at
The Star and Shadow cinema
Newcastle
12th November 2009
paid £4
