Summer Homework - Film Review #1 - French New Wave - Cleo From 5 To 7

 Cleo From 5 to 7: Agnes Varda's Superstitious Parisian Feminist Masterpiece

Paris in the 1960s was a melting pot of groundbreaking intellectualism and cool rebellion, with the critics of the older generation becoming the forefront of the new generation, and using their love for cinema, which many developed as writers for Cahiers du Cinema, to put their existential views of the world onto film. Forerunners of this movement, come to be known as the Left Bank or French New Wave, were Jean Luc-Godard and Francois Truffaut, whose debatably pretentious musings on their resentment towards the older generation manifested itself into some of the most lauded films of all time, with films like The 400 Blows and Breathless defining a generation and pioneering revolutionary filmmaking techniques, such as shooting on location with barely any budget, or elliptical editing.

Besides them, was someone who brought one of the most unique perspectives of the French New Wave: Agnes Varda. Someone who Martin Scorsese described as someone who never "followed in anyone else’s footsteps, in any corner of her life or her art. Every single one of her remarkable handmade pictures, so beautifully balanced between documentary and fiction, is like no one else’s." It doesn't take long to see why such high praise is so deserved. Coming from a background of photography, it only makes sense that every single shot in her 1962 film Cleo from 5 to 7 is delicately beautiful, rich with detail and perfectly arranged to capture what Cleo is feeling throughout the film. From her surgically white home, where she is mentally dissected by her musician friend who undermines her due to her womanhood, to the dark tunnels and dresses which mirror the growing despair she goes through as she is forced to contemplate her own mortality.

It should be said that this film's premise is very simple... Cleo is waiting for a report from the doctor to determine whether she has stomach cancer, but the film's themes are much more complex. The film opens in a colour sequence of tarot card opening, and before we even see Cleo, we are confronted with her fate. The rest of the film is in black-and-white, as Varda removes us from the clarity in which we see Cleo's fate, and now everything is uncertain, even the tarot card reader. This lack of colour also pertains to Cleo's incompleteness as a person, with Cleo only being her stage name as a famous singer, with the film giving her only fleeting moments of loneness. Instead of being herself, she is at the will of her maid and taxi drivers and her doctor, and this is only heightened by the brazenly casual sexism that she frequently encounters during the film.

Varda's uniquely female perspective (female directors are still few and far between even nowadays) allows her to present her views on feminism in a way that makes a genuine statement. What Cleo faces in being called "stuck-up" by passing-by male oglers, or being called "attention seeking" by her songwriter, who makes bold statements about womanhood which the viewer knows are incorrect but also can easily recollect hearing these same assertions about women being manipulative and spoilt, is something universally faced by women, and universally witnessed by all others. Without actively shouting "I am oppressed!", Varda creates a detailed portrait of what it's like being a woman in Paris and still manages to deal with existentialism, war, and art, while she's at it.

As an essential piece of feminist cinema, Cleo, takes the pioneering attributes of the French New Wave one step further by not only rejecting "le cinéma de papa", and replacing it with the new world of auteurs, but actually having a film about women, made by women. This is perhaps best exemplified within the film with the female taxi-driver, literally driving things forward for women, and, even then, her job is still "dangerous". In the end, Cleo - the character, is still dependent on men to help her with coming-to-terms with her diagnosis, and giving her her diagnosis, however these dependencies are wholly desired by Cleo so, whilst there is still a long way to go for women's liberation, Varda shows how a large part of that liberation must come from within.

Cleo's internalisation of misogynistic beauty standards and opinions of herself is directly seen through mirrors throughout the film, as she is made to see herself through the way others see her. Coupled with her superstitions, and Cleo is demonstrated to be beholden to societal constructs, and only receives her "happy" ending when she recognises the superfluousness of conforming to said constructs. All of this is presented much more subtly than put here, and, Cleo, can be easily be viewed as a worried woman riding around Paris and holding existential conversations with several people in an attempt to find some comfort and relief.

Varda also has a backdrop of the Algerian War for Independence, which, given her propensity towards films about the oppressed, is a particularly pertinent aspect of this film's nature, as Varda must confront the oppression caused in Algeria by her own country. These small details, heard in snippets of conversation or on car radios, paint a mostly complete portrait of 1960s Paris, with a literal and symbolic depth-of-field throughout the film.

In a short surrealistic film sequence, within Cleo, Varda seems to reflect on the power of perception, and how, looking at things one way can mean one is looking at things completely wrong. Varda used this film to challenge the incorrect perceptions of women at the time, and the incorrect perceptions anyone can have on their own futures, when confronted with existential anxiety. In the end, the best we can hope for, is that everyone takes off their sunglasses and sees things for what they really are, just as Cleo does in the two hours (well... 90 minutes) in which we get to spend time with her.