Kritiken

In broad strokes Agnès Varda’s second feature film sounds like a downer... [while] in more specific terms it sounds rather uneventful... But the sheer delightfulness of Cléo from 5 to 7 comes down to execution, its form and aesthetic born from the coolest cinema movement of them all: the French New Wave, to which the legendary Varda was a key contributor... This joyous exercise in elegance and style never gets old.

A landmark of feminist filmmaking and one of the definitive releases of the French New Wave... [Varda's] rich visual language and use of time as a narrative structure have inspired filmmakers for decades since, and Cleo from 5 to 7 remains one of the greatest films about the expectations of womanhood.

[Varda's] mastery of craft and willingness to defy convention are always on display, but what stands out most is her gaze. In a film very much about the female gaze... Varda will stop the action to construct vérité sequences of real people on the streets... Through Varda’s eyes, these faces become a celebration of life.

With the kind of playfulness that Varda enjoyed so much, we could call this ticking- clock film timeless. From the feminist analysis of a woman’s commodified beauty and a celebrity’s self-regarding narcissism to the vulnerable heroine acting out her messy emotions in public, the spectre of war and the fear of disease darkening a midsummer day, Cléo from 5 to 7 feels pertinent to the modern moment. It always will.

No one [but Varda] would have taken such a simple, dismal-sounding premise... and turned it into a film that is playful, charming and haunting. Cléo is also the very definition of a masterpiece... It captures the Audrey Hepburn-style fashions and cosmopolitan Parisian setting of its moment, but remains so relevant, so emotionally vibrant and real that it feels contemporary.

Every so often, usually while walking around Toronto on a busy day, I'll be struck by the vividness and accuracy of Agnès Varda's singular portrayal of a day in the life (barely two hours, really, making it even more remarkable) spent in the various layers and spaces of the urban environment.

The film often reveals something about human nature not through pathos but tongue-in-cheek humor. Yet the film's best moments combine both, at the same time or in a sudden, breathtaking shift as mercurial and moody as its heroine.

Varda has placed her warm, witty personality front and center in many of her documentaries, but her charm bubbles to the surface even in this fictive tragedy, charting a few hours in the life of a woman faced suddenly with the certainty of her death.

If the film were only a virtuosic formal exercise, it would probably not have endured as the remarkable, affecting testament that it is... The most wonderful thing about Cléo from 5 to 7 is its air of freedom – evoked, paradoxically, within the very severe constraints of its real-time format, which must have posed a thousand challenges during shooting and post-production. The film is superbly playful.

When Cléo's in a taxi and Varda's shooting from the backseat through the windshield and playing a news broadcast about the Algerian War, the gravity is inescapable. The closer Cléo gets to her diagnosis, the more omens she encounters, and the greater the tension. And at the end of Cléo's odyssey, the catharsis is all the stronger for having gone through the wringer with her.

“Cléo from 5 to 7” plays today as startlingly modern. Released in 1962, it seems as innovative and influential as any New Wave film... While many early New Wave films had a jaunty boldness of style, Varda in this film shows a sensibility to subtly developing emotions.

All of existence, in this work, is intimately orchestrated, choreographed, and meaningful, but, crucially, only for this one moment. The fortune-teller is no mere character but a marker for a structural division that cleaves the entirety of the film.