Plot Details: This opinion reveals everything about the movie's plot.
My precious and capricious body,
The azure of my daring eyes,
My alluring bait, that lies in wait,
That never will deceive
This world that longs to taste
The flavour of my charms and smiles.
. . . . Cléo's song from Cléo from 5 to 7
I'm going to give this film a strong endorsement but, to be honest, after the first half-hour or so of the film, I was starting to anticipate a negative review. Cléo (a.k.a. Florence) was striking me as one of those shallow, self-absorbed, irrational people that I mostly try to avoid or, at least, not hang around too much. Turns out that's precisely what I was supposed to be thinking and feeling about Cléo – up to that point in the film. From there to the end of the film, a whole lot of enhanced self-awareness becomes evident to the attentive viewer. Cléo develops a deeper understanding of herself, as do we. Most remarkably, however, viewers who have paid close attention also learn something new about themselves. The message of this film is probably one that only a female director, like Agnés Varda, would understand or could deliver successfully. Varda has been long linked to both the New Wave auteurs and feminist cinema. Although Cleo from 5 to 7 is neither obviously New Wave nor unequivocally feminist, it makes use of some New Wave techniques and clearly reveals a feminine perspective.
Historical Background: Agnés Varda started making films when it was almost exclusively a male enterprise. She's a bit like the gal who crashes the all-male country club. Though now revered as the Grande Dame of French cinema and of the New Wave in particular, she had to virtually spearhead feminist cinema in order to reach that exalted status. Other New Wave directors, such as Godard and Truffaut, wrought numerous innovations, but they were anything but feminist. Though each often made movies about women, they made them from a male perspective for a male audience. Cleo from 5 to 7 was Varda's first major success as a director.
Varda was born May 30th, 1928 in Brussels, but grew up in France. She studied at the Sorbonne and the Ecôle du Louvre, with the intent of becoming a museum curator, but a stint as a theater photographer awakened her interest in filmmaking. Her film style clearly reveals her early experience in photography. Varda's best films were spaced out over the course of her career and include One Sings, the Other Doesn't (1977) and Vagabond (1985), in addition to the present one. Varda is the widow of director Jacques Demy (Lola (1961) and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)) and has devoted a portion of her time, in recent years, to supervising the restoration of some of his films.
The Story:Cleo from 5 to 7 is filmed in real time, following an hour-and-a-half in the life of Florence (Corinne Marchand), also known by her stage name, "Cléo Victoire." Florence is a beautiful French chanteuse who is in a tizzy, as she awaits results from some medical tests relating to her stomach ailment. Florence has convinced herself that the physician will tell her, later in the day, that she is dying from an incurable disease. The film is structured in a prelude and thirteen titled chapters. Florence is a superstitious young lady and at 5:00 P.M., we find her visiting Irma (Loye Payen), the fortuneteller, hoping for some reassurance. The reading of the tarot cards is ambiguous at best and none too favorable at worst (some of what the soothsayer says does later come to pass). She tells Florence, for example, "I see a new acquaintance. A talkative young man who'll amuse you." Eventually, however, the fortuneteller draws the death card, though she tries, rather unconvincingly, to dampen the blow, saying, "This card does not necessarily mean death. It means a complete transformation of your being." Florence sobs in despair, then collects herself and staggers out, and into Chapter One.
Chapter I: Cléo from 5 to 7, 5:08. Passing a mirror, Florence gazes at her own reflection, reassuring herself, "As long as I'm beautiful, I'm alive." Florence is indeed beautiful and, like many an exceptionally beautiful person, quite narcissistic. Florence is so drop-dead gorgeous, in fact, that every head turns to stare at her as she walks down the street. At a nearby café, Florence meets up with her friend and caretaker, Angèle (Dominique Davray), a somewhat frumpy, middle-aged woman.
Chapter II: Angèle, 5:08 – 5:13. Angèle commiserates with Florence about her fears and the non-reassuring card reading. She tries to cheer Florence with a story about a man who had been sent away by his wife after a doctor had declared him to be dying. He had traveled the world for a few years and when he returned, his wife had died. The man lived to be an old man. In the background, we overhear snippets of conversations from other tables, including the quarreling of a young couple. Florence decides to try to drown her anxieties, in a manner typical of vain young women, with a trip to an up-scale hat boutique. Here Varda brandishes some artsy mirror shots, showing us both Florence's visage, as she tries on various hats, and reflections of a parade taking place on the street outside.
Chapter III: Cléo, 5:13 – 5:18. Florence declares that everything suits her and that trying things on is intoxicating. She's right, of course. She has the kind of face and figure that makes any article of clothing look marvelous. After Florence makes her choice, she and Angèle flag down a taxi and head home. Their driver is a woman (Lucienne Le Marchand). Florence is annoyed when one of her own songs comes up on the radio and, later, when they pass by a voodoo shop. By contrast, a pair of men in a passing car who make cat calls and flirt with her only make her laugh. The women drive through a bohemian district, where a group of art students, dressed in gruesome costumes, jostle their car a bit and push it from behind.
Chapter IV: Angèle, 5:18 – 5:25. The taxi driver relates a story about how she was once attacked by some men and had to radio for help from other taxi drivers. A news broadcast is coming across the radio and there's one story after another about death – in Algiers, where the French are fighting a war, as well as some local accidents. There's a story about Edith Piaf's umpteenth surgical procedure. Florence's disposition sinks even lower. Arriving home, Florence does her stretching exercises and awaits a visit from her lover. Angèle suggests she not talk about her medical problems, saying, "Men hate illness."
Chapter V: Cléo, 5:25 – 5:31. Florence's lover (José Luis de Villalonga) arrives. He's a sophisticated, somewhat older man, obviously of some importance. He's very busy and can only afford a few minutes with her, barely enough for a kiss. After he leaves, Florence declares that he probably wouldn't even notice if she died.
Chapter VI: Bob, 5:31 – 5:38. Two musician friends arrive, one a composer and pianist, Bob (Michel Legrand), and the other a lyricist, Plumitif (Serge Korber). They've got a new song for Florence to learn, but the lyrics, and the ribbing she takes from the musicians, only deepen her despondency.
Chapter VII: Cléo, 5:38 – 5:44. Florence gives up on the song and decides to go for a walk. In the alleyway, she passes a little kid banging on a toy piano. As she walks along the boulevard, she comes to a street performer who is ingesting live frogs, letting their feet dangle from his mouth, swallowing them, and then throwing them up.
Chapter VIII: Quelques Autres, 5:45 – 5:52. Florence stops at the café, again, and picks one of her own songs on the jukebox. None of the other patrons pays any attention to the song and one even complains about the noise. Florence listens to more snippets of conversation, mostly consisting of pseudo-sophisticated gibberish. Back on the street, she draws more stares from whomever she passes by, but her awareness of these people is intermingled with flashes of memory of those in her life, with whom she's interacted during the day – Angèle, the musicians, and her lover. She feels their gaze as well. She walks past another grotesque street performer – a strong man with a long needle stuck through his flexed bicep, which grosses her out. She seeks out a friend, Dorothée (Dorothée Blank), who works as a nude model at a sculptor's workshop. Dorothée has an exquisitely contoured backside, whether seen from an artistic viewpoint or otherwise.
Chapter IX: Dorothée, 5:52 – 6:00. Dorothée is obviously pleased to see her friend, greeting her with some funny faces. She's just acquired a driver's license, so the two lady friends take a drive together. Dorothée says she doesn't mind modeling nude in the slightest. The sculptors have their minds on abstract ideals of shape and artistry. Florence's thoughts are still preoccupied with death. She suggests, for example, that streets should be named after people, so the names could be changed after the people die. She confides in Dorothée about her fears and complains that her boyfriend provides little comfort. Dorothée stops briefly to pick up a package at a station for her boyfriend, Raoul. Raoul works at a movie theater.
Chapter X: Raoul, 6:00 – 6:04. When the gals arrive at the movie house, Raoul screens a comic short for them, a funny little piece that features Jean-Luc Godard, Anna Karina, and Eddie Constantine, in cameos. Later, as Dorothée and Florence are leaving, they come across a small broken mirror.
Chapter XI: Cléo, 6:04 – 6:12. Predictably, Florence interprets the broken mirror as another bad omen. Dorothée tries to reassure her. As they look for a cab, the two young women walk past a café where a man has just been murdered. Dorothée declares, hopefully, "The broken mirror was for the dead man." In the taxi, Florence repays Dorothée's thoughtfulness by giving her the new hat she had bought, after Dorothée takes a shine to it. They pass through a college district, where Dorothée is dropped off near her apartment. Florence has the driver take her to a nearby park, which Dorothée had mentioned. There are kids riding some hobbyhorses. Florence heads down a path toward a remote waterfall. When she comes to a long stone staircase, she impulsively sashays down the steps, swinging her hips like Marilyn Monroe, singing the song at the opening of this review. At the base of the stairs, Florence follows the chirping of a bird to the waterfall, where she stands on a steppingstone and drinks in the soothing sounds of the falling current. Later, on the bridge at the base of the falls, a young man, Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), approaches and engages her in conversation. He's a good conversationalist, mixing information with wit and charm, and a genuine sensitivity for his communication partner. He only slips up once, when he says, "Today, the sun leaves Gemini for cancer." It's the first day of summer, but "cancer" is not the word Florence wanted to hear.
Chapter XII: Antoine, 6:12 – 6:15. Their easy conversation turns to this and that. They share their respective fears; hers for her medical results and his about having to return to Algiers. He's a soldier, nearing the end of a three-week leave. He notices the ring she is wearing. "A pearl and a frog," she explains. "You and me," he says. Antoine offers to accompany her to her hospital appointment and asks if she'll see him off at the station, with the wave of a handkerchief.
Chapter XIII: Cléo, 6:15 – 6:30. They catch a bus in the direction of the hospital. Along the way, they share more intimate moments. Antoine asks if he can have a picture of her, admitting that he wants to impress his friends. He makes her laugh and lifts her spirits. He shows her some interesting kinds of trees as they pass them by and gives her a flower. He points out that there are lots of hospitals in the same area as the one that is Florence's destination and suggests it must be a good place to recover. Florence is dismayed when she's told that her physician, Dr. Valineau (Robert Postee), has left for the day. They set out to look for him, walking through the hospital park, holding hands. Dr. Valineau happens past in his car and stops to give Florence her news. Antoine introduces himself as her brother. "Two months treatment should put things rights," say the physician. After the doctor drives off, Antoine declares, wistfully, "I hate to leave. I'd like to be with you." "You are," says Florence, "My fears seem to have gone. I seem to be happy."
Themes: This film starts out on a rather shallow level and gradually ascends into loftier thematic planes. At first, the film seems to be about nothing more than the anxieties, fleeting moods, and self-absorption of a rather shallow and narcissistic beauty. Certainly, it is natural enough to be disconcerted by pending medical results, but Florence's ordeal seems out of proportion to reality and intensified by the shallowness of her self-image and preoccupation with superstitions. There's a kind of theatricality in her moods and emotions that one might well expect from a performer. She's used to being the center of attention and her admiring throng enjoys gazing on her.
Ravishing beauty is both a source of power and a curse. Florence loves being admired and, indeed, admires her own beauty, stopping countless times, in just the hour-and-a-half covered by the film, to gaze at herself in mirrors. At the same time, she is objectified by the ceaseless parade of stares and catcalls, wherever she goes. As film viewers, we are part of that parade because we all love watching beautiful film stars. Florence has been objectified for so much of her lifetime, probably since childhood, that she has internalized the idea that her beauty is the main basis of all of her interpersonal relationships. She has become complicit in her own objectification. That is the pernicious nature of sexism. Men live for the joy of ogling beautiful women and many of those most beautiful women learn to live for that admiration. Florence dresses to kill and works tirelessly to perfect her good looks, virtually guaranteeing herself a continuous audience.
Varda makes explicit the complicity of (some) women is sexism. During their conversation near the waterfall, Florence asks Antoine if he has ever been in love. He replies, "Often, but never as deeply as I wanted." The girls that he's known, he says, "just like to be loved. They're afraid to give themselves. They love in halves. Their bodies are playthings. So, I stop halfway, too." Some women, perhaps many, Varda is saying, are more concerned about being loved and admired for their beauty than in loving a man or admiring his beauty. That imbalance, of course, is the essence of objectification. It makes the man more the admirer and the woman more the object of love. Varda draws a distinction between objectification and artistic appreciation of beauty and form. Dorothée is not objectified by posing nude for a sculpturing class. All of us are entitled to appreciate the beauty of the male or female form and countenance, whenever artistic activities define the situation at hand.
There's another aspect to the curse of exceptional beauty. Exceptionally beautiful women really have no other realistic alternative but to be somewhat snobbish and standoffish. Every young man notices a beautiful woman and if she gives him the smallest sign of encouragement, each young man will pursue her. She either learns to avoid showing any sign of friendliness to most of the people she meets or she spends an inordinate amount of time fending off unwanted suitors. In the scene at the waterfall, Florence says to Antoine, "All men wait for women. Then, they speak to them. I don't usually reply, but I forgot. My thoughts were elsewhere." Florence's axiom is not universally true. The truth of the statement is proportionate to a woman's beauty.
A girl who is beautiful from early childhood (or, less often, a boy) is usually influenced by all the attention that they draw. They often learn to trade on their attractiveness as their primary mode of interaction with others and as the basis for their self-esteem. They may invest less than average time and effort in developing intellectual, artistic, or manual skills. Although the notion of "blond bimbos" is an obvious instance of stereotyping, stereotypes exist precisely because they are sometimes true. Florence's beauty, in face and body, creates an inherent credibility problem for her in relation to what others will suppose to be the depth and worthiness of her interior thoughts and feelings. Varda makes her viewers complicit in that stereotyping. Varda gives us every reason to view Florence as shallow, vain, and irrational (even as we enjoy her good looks) during the first half-hour of the film. Florence says, "As long as I'm beautiful, I'm alive," reducing her self-worth to no more than her physical appearance. Why should we think more of her than she thinks of herself? It may be terrifying for a woman to be always watched, but how much more so if she watches herself in the same way.
The broken mirror in Chapter X turns out not to be symbolic of death, as superstition would suggest, but the beginning of Florence's escape from vanity and self-objectification. Some viewers, but only some, will participate in that process with her. The second step in Florence's progression comes when she gives away her new hat, which was one of the enhancements to her appearance, as an object for admiration. Finally, she discovers that it is possible to interact with a young man on a basis other than simply her physical beauty. Antoine demonstrates a genuine interest in her feelings and her ideas and in sharing his with her. She learns immediately that he won't settle for a one-way relationship. Some reviewers conclude that the film's ending is a backsliding from feminism because, they claim, it suggests that all Florence needed was a dependable man in her life. I think, instead, that the film says that what Florence needed was a genuine friend in her life who cared about her as a thinking, feeling person, not merely as a beautiful object for adoration. If that new friend happened to be a man, it makes no difference to the point. What Florence needed was genuine (non-objectifying) communication to begin to free herself from the bondage of self-absorption.
The film covers ninety-minutes in the life of Florence, not the two hours implied by the title. That begs the question, "What did Florence and Antoine do from 6:30 P.M. to 7:00 P.M.? That's for them to know and the rest of us to wonder about. One way or another, the frog and the pearl were getting better acquainted.
Production Values: There's so much to like about the script of this film. Varda fills it to the brim with Parisian atmosphere. There's the cafés, the street scenes, the snippets of conversation, and the boutiques. All of that is deftly used to reflect the various moods of our protagonist or, more precisely, the labile moods of our heroine reflect what happens in her surroundings. One reviewer complains that Varda only scratches the surface of her protagonist. Yes, precisely! That's because her protagonist, as the film opens, is all surface. Florence is initially all gloss and no substance, but over the course of the film we are privileged to observe a well-intentioned but shallow person in the process of a transcendent awakening into a deeper quality of self-awareness.
Varda's camerawork always reveals a photographer's perspective. She uses every corner of her frames to reveal life in progress, whether its kittens in the background or a little boy playing a toy piano in an alleyway. Varda possesses a strong sense of layers, giving separate weight to foreground and background. Every frame is, in a sense, a montage, though she uses relatively few quick cuts. The early scene in the hat shop is a tour-de-force of tricky mirror shots. Sometimes Varda seems to become too absorbed in lens stunts. The film also has that raw quality that was characteristic of New Wave cinema. The delightful score is by Michel Legrand, who doubles, in this instance, as a cast member (one of the musicians).
Corinne Marchand is a beautiful woman, at least in one sense of the notion of feminine beauty. She doesn't exude personality. She's not a woman who can be said to reveal her inner beauty by her gestures or facial expression. She comes across as somewhat porcelain (what she herself refers to as "my unchanging doll's face"), but, for her type, she's darn near perfection. She's every bit the head-turner that the part required and her lack of evident depth was also what the role demanded. Marchand was otherwise known for appearances in Lola (1961) and Rider on the Rain (1970). I couldn't keep my eyes off her – sexist pig that I am.
Bottom-Line: This is cinema from a woman's perspective that few men can understand from personal experience. Maybe men like Tom Cruise, Alain Delon, and Richard Gere experience a lot of objectification; most of us do not. Not all women experience objectification either, but the percentage that do, during their years of peak beauty especially, is much higher than for men. That's not to say that a man cannot intellectually understand the issues raised by this film. In fact, more of us should. Judging by the reviews written by male reviewers, most never get beneath the surface with Florence, which is precisely the film's point.
This film is available on both VHS and DVD, but the preferred version is the Criterion DVD, despite its woeful lack of a single worthwhile extra. The audio and visual quality is excellent, based on a restoration supervised by Varda herself. It adheres to the 1.66:1 aspect ratio of the original and the opening color sequence has been restored. I highly recommend this 90-minute film, in French with English subtitles, especially for use in conjunction with Women's Studies programs, but also for any man or woman who wants to better understand the price women (and a smaller number of men) pay for objectification and, even worse, self-objectification.
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