Cleo from 5 to 7 is one of the best films of the New Wave, a masterpiece to stand alongside of Jules and Jim and My Life to Live. This is a film of limitless invention, energy and fun, as well as one of the most densley packed with thematic material and ideas that I have seen.
You know a film is going to be quirky if it proposes to show two hours in someones life but is only ninety minuets long. The film opens at 5:00 pm on a summer's day as Cleo (Corrine Marchand) a French pop singer waits for the results of biopsy that will determine if she is gravley ill. In an attempt to pass the time, she visits or is visited by a variety of people, including a fortune teller with protestations of doom, her manager, two of her songwriters, her best friend (a nude model), another friend who runs a movie theatre and finally a soldier who she begins to fall for- only minuets before she may be told her time on Earth is very short.
No description can really do this movie justice, as it's not really about a woman waiting- in fact it's not about anything, but everything- celebrity, love, life, death and pop culture. Varda uses a huge variety of cinematic techniques and asides to keep up interested- georgeous photography, flashy editing, changes in tone and style, a musical number, and titles. There is also a hilaroious parody of silent comedy starring Jean-Luc Goddard and Anna Karina.
The film is also a kind of conceptual statement. It gives the impression of being improvised and rambling while also being incredibly well strucutred. The neat chapters the film is divided into eventually reaveal themselves to be rather arbitary, and, as mentioned before, the film's running time leads the audince to question where Varda "cheats" in her premise.
The acting is all outstanding, but Marchand carries the picture in her lead role beautifully. I really appreaciated how Varda and the actress were not afraid to make their protagonist somewhat shallow and abrasive- Cleo is a talented singer but not a deep thinker, and is often pouty and demanding. We don't dislike Cleo, but we're not rooting for her like the protagonist in My Life to Live, either.
Is it the fact that a woman directed this film what caused it to fall through the cracks, somekind of Euro-sexism that keeps it from being held in its rightful historical place? I don't know, but this film is as good as the best of Traffaut and Goddard, and superior to that of Resnais.
Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)