Cléo de 5 à 7

Agnès Varda (1962)

I once read a review by Kenneth Robinson of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.  Robinson was frustrated that Petra spent too much screen time in a bed with white sheets and kept hoping she would get up, go out and meet a man in a dark suit ‘against whom the subtitles would be clearly legible’.   I kept thinking the same watching this equally famous film, Agnès Varda’s portrait of a beautiful young Parisian singer as she anxiously awaits the results of medical tests which may reveal she has cancer.  Cléo’s glacially chic apartment, with its acres of white walls and endless white floor, was a particular problem area.   Cléo from 5 to 7 takes place in more or less real time, a screen concept that has always appealed to me:  it may just be that High Noon was one of the first pictures that made an impression on me as a young child and that the continuous timeframe was part of what penetrated.   But I find the idea of a story in real time exciting at a more conscious level too – I like the idea of fusing a lifelike passage of time with an artistic obligation to dramatise this in a probably unlifelike way.   Maybe it was the pressing awareness of what was actually going on in London outside BFI as we were watching Cléo – Gordon Brown resigned and David Cameron set off for the Palace – that distracted me but I don’t think that’s a  complete explanation of why I didn’t much like Varda’s movie.  It’s certainly a very stylish piece of work.  In the end, though, it seems to me not much more than stylish – so artful it’s weightless.   The scenario is a grim one and I’m not sorry Cléo wasn’t more gruelling.  Perhaps what stays with me most is the contrast between the essential and substantial sadness of The Beaches of Agnès, the documentary autobiography which the octogenarian Varda made recently, with her much younger self’s ability here to treat fear of mortality as a thoughtful but coolly confident jeu d’esprit.

Corinne Marchard as the eponymous Cléo is a real problem, I think.   Much of the time she kept reminding me of other people – a young Alison Steadman (at least until Cléo sheds her wig), Patsy Kensit, Debbie Harry.   I felt a strong resistance to a sequence in which a couple of Cléo’s zany friends turn up at her apartment and start clowning around with one of them, played by Michel Legrand, making up tunes on the piano.  I must admit, though, that the main melody that Legrand/Bob the pianist starts playing does have a plangent pull – and that Corinne Marchand comes to life emotionally as she sings it.  (Also, this bit is nowhere near as excruciating as a later ‘silent comedy’ short – including cameos from, among others, Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina – made and shown to Cléo and her sculptor’s model friend Dorothée (Dorothée Blank) by the latter’s boyfriend.)  Corinne Marchand never gives you any sense, though, of a character under the pressure of an absorbing, nagging anxiety.  That may not be a problem if you accept that Varda is making the point that Cléo is so shallow that her anxiety comes and goes or is obscured whenever she’s hasn’t time to think about it.  I don’t really believe this, though:  I thought we were simply watching an erratic and inadequate actress.   As I understood it, we were meant to think at the end of the film that Cléo has risen above scared self-absorption, through the relationship she’s begun to develop with a soldier, on his last day of leave from service in Algeria, whom she meets in the Parc Montsouris.  But I got that message from the pointed editing and camerawork, and from Antoine Bourseiller as the soldier, more than from Corinne Marchand.

I liked the film’s opening sequence, in which we hear Cléo listening to her fortune being told by a tarot reader and watch the cards being laid out before our eyes.   The cards appear in different combinations but, framed within a barely changing camera shot, they impart an increasing claustrophobia, a sense of Cléo being trapped.  The tarot sequences are in colour.  Varda then cuts to the two women in black and white and the effect is almost brutal.   Elsewhere the chiaroscuro of the film, photographed by Jean Rabier and Alain Levent, is beautiful and expressive in its juxtaposition of bright sunshine – the events take place on the longest day of the year – and the deep shadows that seem to be ready to envelop Cléo.  Yet you’re always aware of the ingenious design of the light and shade.   It’s fascinating too to see Paris in the early sixties captured in a documentary style.  But each street shot that rings true – because you receive it as something glimpsed and, so preoccupied is she, barely noticed by Cléo – is cancelled out by an image that’s obviously contrived.  The latter images are sometimes accompanied by what’s meant to be a snatch of overheard conversation but this sounds explicit and artificial.  Cléo’s perambulations on the way to getting her test results (at the Pitié-Salpétrière hospital, where Princess Diana died many years later) are various and each detour makes its point – although you never get the sense that the heroine is intentionally (or even unconsciously) avoiding her inevitable destination.  This being bohemian-intellectual Paris, a good few of the people Cléo encounters have seriously sententious tendencies – even if they seem unlikely bohemian-intellectual material.  The prime example of this is the pleasant soldier.  He’s so given to aphorisms that even Cléo comments on it.

11 May 2010