The Conversation is a feature at Sound on Sight bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their eighth piece, they discuss Agnès Varda’s stunning and essential character study Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962).
DREW’S TAKE
This month brings the Criterion/Eclipse release of the five film box set “Agnès Varda in California,” making August the perfect time to revisit her seminal 1962 film Cléo from 5 to 7. The close to real-time film covers 90 minutes (the title is a slight fib) in the life of a beautiful French pop singer (Corinne Marchand). She has two hours to wait until her Doctor contacts her to confirm if she has cancer and what her prognosis is. In the first scene of the film, Cléo visits a fortune teller whose tarot cards reveal that she will experience a transformative experience that may involve her death. She flees the fortune teller’s house in tears and reassures herself that “as long as I’m beautiful, I’m alive.”
The first time I saw the film in my late teens, I was disturbed by Cléo’s behavior. Here is a woman who balances a legitimate fear of death (who wouldn’t worry about such a diagnosis), allowing that fear to pull her into a swamp of self-pity (her friends poke fun of her history of being a bit of a melodramatic hypochondriac), and bouts of narcissism (she goes into a café and plays her own song on the jukebox in order to gauge how the patrons feel about her music). She is a complex paradox and I fully admit that her narcissism – the film foregrounds this theme throughout via the use of mirrors – in the face of death rubbed me the wrong way.
I begin with this anecdote to make a fairly simplistic argument regarding film criticism, albeit one that seems to merit when a young critic blasts Amour (2012) for simply being “boring…scenes of an old couple getting older” and character “likability” has become a legitimate criteria for evaluating the quality of a text (Matt Fowler criticized The Knick because “No one stands out as a sympathetic character (yet)”).
Sometimes, our method of evaluation is limited by our own life experiences and unfair expectations. Can a twenty-something really appreciate Amour if he hasn’t been with someone for a prolonged period of time? Was Shakespeare’s Macbeth criticized for its lack of likable characters? In other words, sometimes it is our fault for not seeing the merit in a text. Thus, we owe it to our trade and our readers to explore what lies at the foundation of our evaluative criteria and to revisit texts from time to time. Even legendary critics Andrew Sarris (ex. his perspective on Billy Wilder as an auteur) and Roger Ebert (ex. Unforgiven went from being a 2.5 star film to a “Great Movie”) did it.
I’ve revisited Cléo three or four times since I saw it as an undergraduate and each time her paradoxes resonate more with me and actually render her into a flesh and blood character. There is a profoundly human quality inherent in her attempts to distract herself from the very real possibility of death. One sublime manifestation of this comes when her maid starts telling a joke about a terminal diagnosis. The maid is trying to distract Cléo with humor, but it is obviously hitting too closely to home. Varda captures her subjectivity by dialing down the volume of the dialogue of the joke, raising the audio of a conversation at a nearby table, and using a split-screen to juxtapose Cléo’s discomfort with a view of the conversation nearby. The bulk of the film consists of vignettes of distraction (hat shopping, a taxi ride, a musical rehearsal, a film screening) until she finds a young soldier in a beautiful Parisian park. He has worries of his own and yet has found a way to live in the moment. We think back to the tarot card scene and wonder: Will this conversation lead to the moment that “transforms” Cléo or is bad news just around the corner?
I will not spoil the ending here (although I’ll note that it always surprises me that there is a fairly definitive conclusion – I tend to remember the film as being much more ambiguous), but I will take a few brief paragraphs to reflect – mirror pun callback intended – upon two additional topics: the film’s feminist bent and its historical context. Regarding the former, Cléo is a film that foregrounds the superficiality of outward appearances. ‘60s chic fashion, fame, and a pop star smile may sell the outward illusion that Cléo is happy, but Varda’s use of contradictory first-person voice over undermines it. Moreover, while Cléo is aware of this gender construction (she claims she is treated differently because she is a woman) on one level, her obsession with beauty creates its own prison. Furthermore, Varda repeatedly challenges the objectifying male gaze of Hollywood cinema. Much of the film is shot from Cléo’s perspective (or close to it), placing the visual emphasis on what and how she sees rather on how others see her. In one scene where she is receiving the male gaze from two catcalling passengers in another car, Varda keeps the camera close to her, magnifying her discomfort.
This concern with subjectivity runs through the modernist cinema of the French New Wave. While the film movement often experiences a bit of a canonical whitewash that puts critics-turned-filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard in the foreground, the work of the Left Bank filmmakers (Varda, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais to name but a few) had its own distinctive markings. While the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd largely riffed on Hollywood genres (for instance, Truffaut and Godard both paid homage to pulp thrillers), the Left Bank explored cinema’s ties to other art forms like photography (Marker’s La Jette), painting (Resnais’s documentary on Guernica), and literature (specifically the nouveau roman, as embodied by Resnais’s collaborations with Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras). The resulting mode of filmmaking often combined the personal with the political: fiction filmmaking with a more subjective form of documentary. This is where Varda’s trajectory ultimately ended up, with such wonderful documentary essay films as The Gleaners and I (2004) and the autobiographical Beaches of Agnès (2008). Yet, we can clearly see the start of those trends manifesting themselves here. Cléo, like its protagonist, is a complex jewel to behold.
LANDON’S TAKE
As this was my first time seeing Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, and as I have just seen the film long after my teen years (where I now know all to well than to anticipate anything but Brechtian distance from the protagonist of an early ‘60s French art film), what struck me most about this wonderful film is its fascinating relationship to time, especially in its construction of what Drew eloquently terms its “vignettes of distraction.” Cléo from 5 to 7 is, on its surface and as its title indicates, a film structured in something resembling “real time.” It’s a convention so thoroughly established now as to have structured both a Kiefer Sutherland television show and a forgettable late-Pacino role. But even in the cinematic playground of the early 1960s, it was radical way to approach cinematic time, an effort that – like Varda’s New Wave and Left Bank cohorts – directly challenged both the conventions and ideological assumptions of the Classical Hollywood Style by its very conceit, ridding traditional narrative filmmaking one of its central illusions: the condensing of time.
Yet by 1962 real time cinema had a couple of high-profile precedents. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), the master of suspense allowed an upper-crust penthouse party to unfold as a murdered corpse lied rotting within a living room chest. The film’s tension grows around the specter of death that goes unnoticed by many of the party’s guests, but always threatens to reveal its ugly truth. In Fred Zinneman’s High Noon (1952), a lawman waits as he must confront, alone, a group of killers as the question of the inevitable confrontation’s outcome looms over its runtime. Cléo from 5 to 7’s premise would seem to combine these two devices of prior real-time filmmaking by introducing both the haunting reality of death and the tense process of waiting. Yet Varda’s film focuses principally on the quotidian atmosphere that inflects its title character’s life – chance encounters, wayward sights, overheard conversations – instead of a more conventionally dramatic device of using its continually reappearing clock (which greets viewers every few minutes with an onscreen chapter title and time of day) to propels us, suspended, towards Cléo’s fate and, with it, the film’s end.
Even within a declaratively finite runtime and decisively narrow temporal framework, Varda focuses on the episodic, textural aspects of Cléo’s life and, in so doing, produces an image of early 1960s Paris that is every bit as richly realized in its superficial allure disguising complex layers of personality as its title character. Cléo from 5 to 7 frequently takes its focus off of Cléo to let more atmospheric observations play out, such as when a taxi ride across town finds conversation dwindling, which allows for the broadcast of nearly an entire news program detailing the Algerian war, or (as Drew mentions) an extended scene where Cléo both overhears and shirks from a variety of conversations in a café. And even when Cléo remains in the frame, there is notable competition on its margins by Paris’s numerous colorful day players, from lonely children to street entertainers, all captured in footage that, at times, resembles the vérité efforts of Varda’s colleagues. Cléo from 5 to 7, in short, takes a decisively unconventional and seemingly counterintuitive approach to cinematic time, regularly disrupting any sense of urgency or even its continued investigation of character with seemingly divergent episodes with the erratic supporting cast of Cléo’s life. Yet it is in these moments that the audience is most directly invited to partake in Cléo’s subjectivity, realizing what Drew calls the film’s “visual emphasis on what and how she sees rather on how others see her,” to witness what her eyes observe and take in what her ears pick up within the crowded mosaic of the accelerating modern metropolis in which she resides.
And this is the film’s genius, for Varda’s approach to time here is hardly just another arthouse disruption and reconfiguration of cinematic logic, but rather functions alongside the film’s feminist approach to form mentioned by Drew. In Rope, real time affords us the privilege of experiencing male leisure all the way to its dark, satirical edge. In High Noon, one man’s “real time” is mobilized by the ideals of purpose and justice. Cléo’s real time entails an acute awareness of one’s quotidian surroundings and encounters, in which news of immanent death takes up the same screen space as spontaneous social engagements and everyday insecurities. Despite the film’s title and conceit, time in Cléo from 5 to 7 seems episodic, cyclical, even non-linear, an aspect heightened by the fact that (per Drew) the title does not strictly describe its temporal framework. In order to produce a feminine subjectivity for the cinema, Varda had to reject the myth of masculine time as expressed in the cinema, for the plot points around which time is condensed and organized in narrative cinema is often around that of men’s work, accomplishments, and successes, a temporal manifestation of heroism and achievement. To actually experience time as it really occurs – filled as it is with banal anticipation and unpredictable happenings – is to put this purposeful myth of narrative time into stark relief, to challenge the false comforts of linearity. In this respect, Cléo from 5 to 7 is something of a precedent for that masterful feminist representation of quotidian time that would arrive more than a decade later, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).