Cléo de 5 à 7

A few months back TCM ran the movie Cleo from 5 to 7 as part of a tribute to director Agnès Varda. Not having done a post on it here before, I decided to DVR it and sit down to watch it.

Florence, nicknamed Cléo (Corinne Marchand), is a young singer living in Paris whose career is just taking off. However, her career might be over before it started. She's been having some sort of stomach pains, and having gone to a specialist to see what's wrong, is worried that it might be cancer. It's the first day of summer, and this evening is when the results of her tests are supposed to come back. The film is set entirely in the period between 5:00 and 7:00 PM.

After a visit to a tarot card reader, Cléo meets her maid Angèle, first going to a café and then buying a hat before returning home, where she's going to rehearse a new song with her friends Bob (Michel Legrand) and Marcel. But Cléo is getting moody, and she eventually runs off to see her friend Dorothée, who works as a model for art students. Dorothée takes Cléo to see Raoul, a projectionist who is Dorothée's boyfriend. A the movie theatre, they watch a short which is an absurdist comedy.

After Cléo takes Dorothée home, she goes to a park, where she meets Antoine, a soldier on leave from the war in Algeria (remember that Algeria was still a part of France at the time and fighting for its independence). They strike up a fast friendship, and he eventually accompanies her to the hospital where she is to learn the results of her test.

There's not much going on in the movie, at least not on the surface. Certainly, there's a lot less going on than in One Wonderful Sunday. It's the sort of movie that shouldn't be my cup of tea, but I found that it did work reasonably well. I think the big reason why I normally might not like the movie is that Cléo is a character type that I normally find it difficult to have any sympathy for. The big reason that the movie does work, at least for me, is the filming style, which really feels spontaneous and shows a look at Paris at it probably was in the early 60s, a lot more than something like Paris Blues which does have quite a Hollywood feel to it.

I would admit, however, that there are going to be people who have a difficult time with the relative paucity of plot in Cléo from 5 to 7. It also only seems to be available as part of a pricey box set of Varda's movies, so if you want to watch it, you're either going to have to wait for another TV showing, or spend a pretty penny.