Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)
Directed by Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.
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What critics compared Cléo from 5 to 7 to
Because of its sexual content, Romance is being compared to Last Tango in Paris and In the Realm of the Senses , but its microscopic focus on a single characters psychological state ties it to films such as Cleo From 5 To 7 and Repulsion .
When Agnès Varda died earlier this year at the age of 90, she ended her career having followed her own path from her earliest days to the end, including some final films reflecting on her own mortality that were as invested with energy as Cléo From 5 to 7 .
With this, a more mature response to Breathless (Godard and Anna Karina make cameos as silent movie actors), Varda transforms the typical French cinema gamine into a complex, tragic figure: the girl who's all too good at playing plaything, forced to face the hollowness of her youth.
All throughout, Varda captures the fairy-tale essence of early-'60s Paris with a vivacity and richness that rivals Godard's Breathless .
There's a heightened urban suavity to an early scene inside a trendy hat shop that tips its, well, hat to Citizen Kane .