With Cléo from 5 to 7, Agnès Varda makes a notable entry into the New Wave movement (even though La Pointe courte had already anticipated it). Set in Paris, the action takes place in real time on June 21, 1961, and tells the story of a young and beautiful pop singer anxiously awaiting the results of a medical test. Confined to the role of a "doll" that everyone indulges without trying to understand her, Cléo suddenly becomes aware of the vanity of her existence. After an emotional shock, she goes down to the street and starts to observe the world around her. A young soldier on leave from the Algerian War will help her combat her fear of cancer. Directed during the summer of 1961, Cléo is Agnès Varda's second feature film, after she became a filmmaker in 1954, previously a photographer at the age of 33. The film embraces some principles of the New Wave, a movement that significantly renewed the way films were made in France at the end of the 1950s.

In what way is Cléo from 5 to 7 a film made with what is at hand?

• A female filmmaker who writes her own screenplay, a shoot in natural settings, and new interpreters. Varda surrounds herself with novice actors, chosen for their closeness to their characters: Corinne Marchand (Cléo) was a music hall singer, Michel Legrand (Bob) a genuine film music composer.

What is striking is that it is directed by a woman and places another woman at the center of a narrative that lasts the exact duration of the screening, which is 1 hour and 30 minutes. The press also commented extensively on the resonation of two major concerns of the time: the fear of cancer with Cléo's character and the Algerian War with Antoine's character.

The issue of mirrors in the film:

Cléo's journey through Paris is punctuated by a series of pauses during which the heroine tirelessly questions her image in the reflections of various mirrors she encounters along her way. In the fortune-teller's hall, Cléo reassures herself in the narcissistic contemplation of her unaltered image. In the first café, she sees a fragmented image that materializes the turmoil of personality she experiences. In the hat shop, the mirrors reflect a dismembered body: Cléo is reduced to the state of an erotic object. Once down in the street, she searches for her image in a broken mirror: this time, the contemplation of her reflection is no longer enough to soothe her. Finally, when leaving the screening, her friend Dorothée breaks her pocket mirror. Behind this trivial incident, Cléo sees a sign of death that awakens her old superstitions.

The interpretation of the song "Without You" suddenly makes her realize that she is just a frozen image, a mere appearance without content.

Time:

Throughout the film, objective time represents a threat to the heroine: it indicates the duration separating her from the announcement of her medical results. This objective time manifests itself in two ways in the film. In the soundtrack: through a music that is punctuated with more or less intensity when Cléo leaves her house. In the image: through the profusion of clocks, watches, and meters.

In Cléo's life, subjective time often dominates. A time that sometimes stretches like rubber (the bus ride), sometimes contracts (first taxi ride), or, at other times, stops and stands still (when she descends the fortune-teller’s stairs). As the deadline for the verdict approaches, one certainty emerges: thanks to the calming presence of Antoine, Cléo seems to have tamed time; she stops being its plaything and surprises herself by domesticating it. "It seems to me that I am no longer afraid. It seems to me that I am happy," will be the last words she pronounces.

Two times highlighted in this film: objective time (that of clocks) and subjective time (that of consciousness).

The light:

Varda chose to bathe her heroine in an atmosphere of almost permanent overexposure. For Cléo, this overwhelming light is already a dissolution into nothingness, "a pale death, a white death, like in a hospital," says Varda. Thus, Cléo's studio, flooded with this white light, seems empty; it lacks that human warmth that the singer so desperately needs. In the street, the light is aggressive: it ruthlessly sculpts faces and renders some beings monstrous. Finally, for the scene in Montsouris Park, Varda asked her cinematographer to use a green filter to make the lawns “creamy, snowy, unrealistic.” In Cléo, light becomes a fundamental element of language.

The illness:

The emergence of this illness (cancer) in French society at the time:

A painting by Hans Baldung Grien, The Young Girl and Death (1517).

Literature inspired by Agnès Varda: Denis Diderot's novel, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, evoked a wandering in Paris.

A documentary about Paris:

Varda chose, for many scenes, to maintain real distances and set her cameras in authentic Parisian places: cafés, streets, train stations, public gardens, etc. She endeavored not only to preserve their nature but also to restore their sociological truth on screen. The Café du Dôme is thus populated with the artists and students who frequented it. The Vavin intersection is animated by hawkers.

The setting here is not neutral: it serves to anchor the character in a reality resonant with her inner life or, on the contrary, functions as a disrupting element. Just as Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless can be perceived as "a documentary on Paris in the summer of 1959," this strong relationship to the urban landscape makes Cléo from 5 to 7 a kind of documentary on Paris in June and July 1961.

• Periods and movements

Through its production, the story of its shooting rooted in a documentary gesture, its aesthetic choices (natural settings, synchronous sound experimentation, innovative editing without fixed rules, etc.), as well as the lens on the era and the situated photography of its time, Cléo from 5 to 7 is situated within the methods and ambitions of the authors of the "New Wave" with which it consciously dialogues.

A very personal manifest work as well as incubator, it nonetheless delineates the Varda gaze that will soon break free from any assignment to a genre or movement.

• Reception and audiences

Whether through its successes in film clubs, its numerous adaptations (including photo novels), or its interpretations by American feminists from the 1970s to the 2000s, Cléo from 5 to 7 has sparked numerous variations and interpretations depending on the times, cultural areas, and public sphere events. For each of these reprises, the recognition and legitimization of this work are renewed.

Around these multiple readings, different communities of interpretation coalesce, forming changing audiences with which the work engages in a reciprocal gaze.