In showing us a woman whose sense of self is formed not by inner desires and drives but by her need for approval in the eyes of others, Varda is confronting the vanity of a beautiful woman as well as her beauty. It is an odyssey that, like so many French films, is about the double delight of watching a beautiful woman against the backdrop of the most beautiful of cities, but it is also a spiritual journey from blindness to awareness, and from self- absorption to the possibility of love. We follow as she wanders through different sections of the city in the two hours preceding a dreaded doctor’s appointment, where she will get her final test results. Varda’s photojournalistic instincts are apparent in the way she turns Paris into a hall of mirrors-windows and faces that reflect the heroine back to herself. The story is of a woman, a spoiled pop singer named Cléo (Corinne Marchand) suddenly confronting cancer-and, what for her is even worse than death, the possibility of ugliness and disfigurement. Varda didn’t share the film-buff (and theoretical Cahiers du cinéma) roots of Truffaut and Godard rather, her background as a photojournalist, then documentarian, expresses itself in the styling of striking images upon which the rush of news-of-the-day events are constantly intruding. More than any of the others, one feels in Cléo the influential shadow of Godard (he actually appears in a film within the film) in the heady exhilaration at breaking narrative rules, in the use of hand-held camera, and in the featuring of Paris itself as a character in the film. All the rejuvenating forces of French cinema were coalescing in a rapidfire succession of new names, new films, the “New Wave”: 1962 was the same year of husband Jacques Demy’s La Baie des anges, a year after Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, two years after Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and three after Claude Chabrol’s Les cousins and Les bonnes femmes.
Its appearance in 1962 signaled Varda’s participation in the collective burst of talent that made the early sixties one of the most exciting and creative periods the cinema has ever known. Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, the first fully-achieved feature by the woman who would become the premiere female director of her generation, dazzled when it opened, and looks even more timely today in its tackling of the fashionable subject of female identity as a function of how women see and are seen by the world.
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