Cleo From 5 to 7 (Cleo de cinq a sept), per its title, concentrates on two hours in the life of a woman. Those hours are desperate ones, in that Cleo, a pop singer, awaits the results of her tests for cancer. Director Agnes Varda stages the film in "real" rather than subjective time, its various episodes divided into chapters, using significant Tarot cards. During the allotted time, Cleo visits her friends, tries to sing her worries away, spends money, and cries. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
Varda transforms the typical French cinema gamine into a complex, tragic figure: the girl who's all too good at playing plaything, forced to face the hollowness of her youth.
Generally, Mlle. Varda is so absorbed with her camera stunts, as she is in that scene in the hat shop or when she is screening that comedy short, that the essential concentration on the heroine is neglected and the interest lost.
The Parisian streetscapes are beautiful and thrilling, and the tarot scene at the beginning, combined with overheard fragments of anxious city lives, give this something of TS Eliot.
Varda uses her documentary skills to take an objective approach to the material, rather than a sentimental one. It's amazing how much can happen in two hours.
By most accounts, photographer-turned-director Agnès Varda is considered the archetypal girl who crashed the big boys' clubhouse, and Cléo from 5 to 7 was the film that paid her membership fee.
Why Agnes Varda's Cleo From 5 to 7 is not considered a classic of the French New Wave on the order of Truffaut's The 400 Blows or Godard's Breathless is a complete mystery. Well, I tell a lie.
while the plot is quite simple, a young capricious woman awaiting test results, this is filmmaking at its finest. varda creates a new fiction by merging real time, cinema verite, and multiperspectives. WOW!
This is from the Criterion Film Collection. I guess its because I am not french or maybe its just a bad run of French Films lately but I think I am going to pass on the french films for a while, I tried I really did, good Black and white background scenes, but is was painfull to hang in there till the end.
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