So Cl\u00e9o from 5 to 7<\/em> \u2013 one of the centerpieces of Criterion\u2019s new comprehensive Varda box set<\/a>, and currently streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a> and HBO Max<\/a>\u2013 sets for itself the seemingly impossible goal of being a lighthearted examination of certain death. Even more impossibly, it succeeds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019ll know for sure this evening,\u201d explains Cl\u00e9o Victoire (Corinne Marchand), a modestly successful young singer, who worries that her stomach pains are a symptom of something more serious. \u201cThis evening\u201d she\u2019ll get her test results back, confirming either a case of cancer or a case of hypochondria, and she has some time to kill in the interim, time she\u2019ll spend alternately fretting, commiserating, shopping, running errands, \u201cresting,\u201d entertaining visitors, drinking, sulking, and flirting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some of this time is spent in the company of Ang\u00e8le, her worrying, superstitious companion \u2013 officially her maid, but also something of a personal assistant and confidante. Varda compellingly explores this complex, love\/hate relationship \u2013 they both care for and exasperate each other, in roughly equal proportion, and it\u2019s frankly not hard to sympathize with Ang\u00e8le; Cl\u00e9o comes off, early on at least, as something of a brat. She paints herself as at death\u2019s door, but she does so while literally riding on an in-home swing in her swanky apartment, or lounging in her ornate bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cShe just wants attention,\u201d sneers Bob, one of her musical collaborators, while arriving for a visit (and rehearsal), and a moment like that \u2013 one of the few in the film in which her subject is off-screen \u2013 is telling. Varda will grant Cl\u00e9o\u2019s hunger for melodrama, while allowing that it can co-exist with the dismissals of those around her; Ang\u00e8le and especially Bob discount her pain, real or imagined, because it\u2019s easier that way. When Cl\u00e9o declares, \u201cEveryone spoils me\u201d and \u201cNo one loves me,\u201d she is, yes, looking for attention. She\u2019s also not getting it otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Again, the distance between subject and style is striking; Varda\u2019s set-up is urgent, but not her execution. Cl\u00e9o\u2019s conundrum is, quite literally, a matter of life and death, but the character (and the filmmaker) keeps engaging in little sidebars and bits of chit-chat \u2013 because everything is not at the service of a plot. The manner in which Cl\u00e9o rolls with whatever Varda throws her way gives the picture a welcome, off-the-cuff quality. Yet Varda will happily deceive us with the quality as well, as in the magical moment when she slyly moves from a casual piano-side rehearsal into a full-on, full-emotion musical number, and then shifts right back again. The character is on a clock, but we can wander from it; the little timestamps that Varda inserts as on-screen text, part of her diligent \u201cchapter\u201d headings, become more of a check-in, a tick-tock, an occasional reminder of the news awaiting her at the end. And it doesn\u2019t only remind the viewer; occasionally those frames seem to jolt Cl\u00e9o herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She finally, fleetingly escapes to nature, with a freewheeling frolic through the park, an escape that turns into a bit of a Meet Cute. The film\u2019s third act is something of a proto-Before Sunrise<\/em> with a handsome stranger, a soldier on leave who\u2019s on his own deadline, heading out shortly after Cl\u00e9o gets her long-promised news. The anonymity of this encounter brings out her vulnerability, and thus, her kindness. A bit of honest human interaction changes her entire outlook; near the end of the film, she groans to him,\u00a0 \u201cWe have so little time,\u201d but then, moments later, in the same tone, \u201cWe have plenty of time.\u201d It\u2019s all relative, you see. The meticulousness of the timestamps in the chapter headings are a fake-out, an indicator of precision and micromanagement. But some things are simply out of our control, and in the course of the day, certain events cannot help but alter our perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Real life, Varda whispers, will always interrupt. Cl\u00e9o\u2019s story is never just<\/em> Cl\u00e9o\u2019s story; when she\u2019s out in public, Varda layers in snippets of nearby, overheard conversations, a gentle suggestion that this is just one of many lives playing out every day in every space, each submerged in its own drama. But her subject is Cl\u00e9o, and by the conclusion of this extraordinary film, we\u2019ve seen this woman experience fear, pain, joy, anger, and least likely of all, hope. She\u2019s allowed that complexity. Varda\u2019s friend and fellow French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who would release his third feature the same year as this one, famously said, \u201cThe only way to criticize a movie is to make another movie.\u201d And if that\u2019s true, that may very well be what Varda was doing in Cl\u00e9o from 5 to 7<\/em>: creating the kind of fully-realized female character that her French New Wave contemporaries rarely bothered to envision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c<\/em>Cl\u00e9o from 5 to 7\u201d is now available in the Criterion Collection\u2019s<\/em> <\/em>\u201cThe Complete Films of Agn\u00e9s Varda\u201d<\/em><\/a> Blu-ray box set. It\u2019s also streaming as part of the<\/em> <\/em>Criterion Channel<\/em><\/a>\u2019s<\/em> <\/em>\u201cDirected by Agn\u00e9s Varda\u201d<\/em><\/a> program, and as one of the Criterion selections on HBO Max.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The duality that defines Agn\u00e9s Varda\u2019s Cl\u00e9o from 5 to 7 is present from, quite literally, its opening frames: a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":14716,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1431,1422],"class_list":["post-14713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14713"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22749,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14713\/revisions\/22749"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/cleo2-1024x576.jpeg\")
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