Algerian War Epic
Agnes Varda’s Cléo
By Charlie Bertsch
Agnes Varda’s 1962 film Cléo From 5 to 7 is a light film about the heaviest subject of all.
Mortality casts a shadow over everything Cléo experiences, from the tarot reading in the opening sequence to the final scene outside a hospital.
While waiting to find out whether she has cancer, she tries to distract herself with a series of superficial pursuits.
Yet nothing can derail her train of thought for long, which motors forward towards her doom.
It’s clear from the title that the film’s treatment of temporality is crucial.
Although the passing of two hours is objectively verifiable – more so, indeed, than almost anything else – how we experience it is subjective, sometimes to an astonishing degree.
Who hasn’t felt that pleasure speeds up their passage? Who hasn’t been frustrated by the way that boredom slows them down?
By relating her story in real time, depicting three-quarters of the two hours that her anxious protagonist must wait for the results of a medical test, Varda draws our attention to how that period expands and contracts for Cléo depending on her circumstances.
First and foremost, we see how the possibility that she is gravely ill changes her perception of time. Two hours that would normally seem inconsequential now seem momentous.
What’s less obvious to a first-time viewer, especially one who doesn’t know Paris well, is how Cléo from 5 to 7 translates time into space.
Cinema has been about collapsing distances, both temporal and spatial, from the outset.
One of the most impressive things about Cléo From 5 to 7 is its thematisation of this process.
When Cléo is walking, the pace of the film slows. The camera lingers on the sights that catch her eye.
On the other hand, when she is riding in a taxi or bus, the scenery flies past too quickly to digest fully. The space of Paris contracts along with the time it takes to traverse the city.
The real-time experience of this compression is similar to watching a newsreel when complex events are distilled into a few moments.
Varda is careful not to blow things out of proportion.
It’s possible to interpret Cléo’s wandering in allegorical terms. But the film never insists that we do so. On the contrary, Cléo from 5 to 7 works fine when taken literally.
Although the way it is broken up into chapters encourages us to think of the epic, the story’s scope and Cléo’s self-absorption identify the film as a mock epic, in which events of world-historical importance give way to ones that primarily matter to the protagonist.
Despite spending most of the story on the busy streets of Paris, Cléo mostly sees herself reflected in a variety of mirrors.
Filmmakers love to show off their technique with reflections.
From the perspective of psychoanalytic film theory, this represents a doubling of suture, the disappearing act played by the camera in conventional narrative cinema. Only the camera is hidden within the frame, instead of the invisible space between shots.
Cléo From 5 to 7 is a true tour-de-force in this regard.
Not only does the film show a plethora of mirrors, large and small, it lingers over surfaces that function almost like screens.
But Varda isn’t just showing off.
The doubling of suture in reflections goes hand in hand with a doubling of the protagonist’s face when she repeatedly scrutinises her face.
We see Cléo seeing herself. And we also see the camera not seeing itself as we see her.
After she visits the tarot reader, Cléo composes herself before exiting the building by studying her appearance in a shot that shows an infinite regress of reflections.
When she heads back outside later in the film, leaving behind the musicians she is collaborating with and her assistant at her flat, she confronts a world in which self-regard seems primary.
Looking into a window with Chinese characters painted on top, Cléo becomes aware of her asymmetrical relationship with the strangers she encounters: “I think everyone’s looking at me. But I only look at myself.”
Towards the film’s end, it becomes apparent that this narcissism is a dead-end.
After Cléo drops her purse, the compact mirror inside shatters. Superstitious, she takes this bad omen as further confirmation that the news she is waiting for will be bad.
However, a reconsideration of her tarot reading suggests a more positive interpretation.
Yes, she is marked for death. So are we all.
What matters isn’t how one dies but how one lives. And the best way to live requires focusing on something other than this dark fate.
When the tarot reader turns over the card for death, Cléo gasps in horror. But the reader cautions her not to indulge in a superficial interpretation.
“It means a complete transformation of your being,” she explains.
And that is what the film ends up showing us. After her mirror shatters, Cléo meets the talkative young man that the tarot reader had predicted, though she seems to have forgotten the cards.
Their surprising conversation is the catalyst for a change of heart. He accompanies her to the hospital, using all his charm to combat her destructive introspection.
By the time she receives the news she has been dreading, it has lost its power over her.
The Cléo reflected back to her earlier in the film has been dispersed like her reflection in the pieces of a shattered mirror. Indeed, she isn’t really Cléo at all, since the young man has been calling her by her birth name, Florence.
Her transformation isn’t hard to notice once you dispense with the notion that the film is about Cléo, as opposed to the human being that performance conceals.
What’s less obvious, but all the more important as a consequence, is that Cléo From 5 to 7 is also a kind of war film.
As Cléo wanders through Paris, we hear conversations about the war in Algeria. Because the story takes place in 1961, we now understand that Varda was slyly acknowledging the final stage of the North African colony’s struggle for independence.
Cléo herself is too focused on her own predicament to pay attention to these ambient reminders that France is at war.
Only when the talkative young man she meets towards the end of the film reveals that he has been on leave from the army and must now return to his unit does she recognise that her struggle with mortality is shared with French soldiers overseas, not to mention the insurgents they are fighting.
Just as the shattering of the mirror in Cléo’s purse signals a transformation of her being, it also betokens a rupture in the self-conception of France.
The colonial power is doomed.
But the death of that France does not mean the death of France. On the contrary, letting go of its overseas possessions can have the same positive impact, collectively speaking, that Cléo’s renunciation of her public image can have for her on an individual level.
In other words, Cléo From 5 to 7 reflects much more than its protagonist realises.
Although the film has the scope of a mock epic, the implicit equation of Cléo and France doubles the narrative, transforming it into the negative space of an epic worthy of Homer and Virgil.
Screenshot courtesy of the University of Michigan. All rights reserved.
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