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French New Wave cinema
marked, in my opinion, the first real and open challenge to
the pre-conceived notion of the tradition film narrative.
As with cinema realiste which preceded it, the
experimental new crop of filmmakers took moviemaking out of
the studios and into real life, but taking it one step
further. It attempted to capture life not only in terms of
people and settings, but in events unfolding. Scripts were
barely more than a road map. Camera movement and placement
was not rigid nor flowing, but free and uncontrolled, and
more than ever before, gave the viewer a sense of
participating in the action on screen, as opposed to simply
observing from a distance.
It didn't always work…the risk
these artists took in creating with such broad strokes and waiting
to see what would happen is that sometimes, nothing did. The least
impressive examples of New Wave come across as tedious exercises in
faith, and are works that only appeal to the most die hard student.
Others, like Cleo From 5 to 7,
are almost miraculous to behold, because they manage to stumble
across real intelligence and truthful human drama. Directed by
Agnes Varda, the picture embraces the tradition of New Wave by
simply following a woman in real time for an hour and a half of her
life. It could have been any hour and a half, but it almost feels
like a stroke of cinematic fortune that this particular period of
time occurs while she awaits the results of a biopsy.
Cleo (Marchand) is a beautiful
young singer who first visits a fortune teller to learn of her
fate. Superstitious by nature, this would seem to be a mistake, as
the medium is not able to calm her fears. Not necessarily
predicting death but merely significant change, Cleo sets out into
the world, and we, the audience, count down the time with her.
The film is unceremoniously broken
up into “chapters”, which affirm the real time nature of the
events. You can track each marker on your own clock to confirm.
These chapters spring up as plain titles on the bottom of the
screen…sometimes in mid action, sometimes when the camera is not
even on Cleo. It's fascinating in the way it makes you think of
the passage of time in increments of what you're doing, important or
otherwise. I noticed, for example, that Mike from 4:30 to 6 was
watching Cleo From 5 to 7.
Her hour and a half displays
existential thought amongst trivial actions like buying a new hat,
rehearsing a new song, or even a taxi cab ride that actually focuses
the camera out of the windows and continues real time
documentation…how much of life is spent in just that manner? Cleo's
view of her situation grows from a pessimistic and fatalistic
approach to one more open and optimistic…no small leap, but
significant in the fact that we, the audience, share in this period
of growth with her.
True to the style of New Wave,
Varda's camera captures events with a sense of realism. In a
crowded caf鬍 for example, the point of view listlessly wafts from
Cleo and the subject at hand to a nearby table where a couple is
having a sexual argument. This is not significant story-wise, but
stylistically, one can't help but feel the camera has its own
sensitivity, and it is briefly drawn to the more interesting
scenario just as we would be. Other times, the camera follows cars
as they travel, or picks up its own reflection in a mirror without
concern, or seems to be in the way of the characters. Scenes of
regular people walking down the street are used to great effect; the
people stare right into the camera lens with the awareness of being
filmed. Edited together with shots of Cleo walking, these
non-committed stares suddenly become more probing, and possibly more
judgmental.
Framing is not always perfect;
sometimes, principal figures are cut almost all the way off to the
left and right. Then again, with this style of filmmaking, Varda
almost seems to invite the audience to ignore the foreground and
focus on things that might be inconsequential in other movies.
Perhaps if Cleo's hour and a half is meant to be a journey of
rediscovering life, such stylistic choices are the right ones.
Near the end, she meets up with a
young soldier, Antoine (Bourseiller), who is about to come off his
leave and return to Algeria, where his fate is as uncertain as
Cleo's. Whether or not one could call this a romance is
questionable…at least, it isn't in the traditional sense of filmed
entertainment…but what emerges in the last fifteen minutes (which is
also the last marked chapter) is something more touching and more
humanly real than just a meet-cute followed by horribly scripted
lines of love. Cleo, sans wig and in black, and arguably at her
least becoming, genuinely inspires the interest of Antoine.
The fact that they have in common
a sense of waiting for destiny opens up a lot more possibilities
than the film is willing to explore. After all, the movie is about
a specific 90 minutes in Cleo's life…these 90 minutes. The
next 90 might prove to be just as fascinating, but that's someone
else's film.
The point is, between the fortune
teller and the soldier, there has been a complete change of Cleo's
philosophy of life. She has grown from shallow and self-centered
into being more in tune with her true self and the world around
her. She goes from believing a diagnosis of cancer will be a huge
dead end to accepting that she still has some control, and choices
to make, fate be damned.
This, above all, makes Cleo
such an extraordinary film. We are not experiencing adventure,
romance, or melodrama here, but rather, a very intimate look at how
the heart and mind can change under quietly dire circumstances.