Why Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 deserves to be a classic (2024)

Agnès Varda received more votes than any other director in BBC Culture’s poll of the greatest films made by women. Caryn James explores why the experimental director is finally gaining recognition – and what makes Cléo from 5 to 7 so special.

When Agnès Varda accepted an honorary Oscar in 2017, she called Angelina Jolie and Jessica Chastain, who had paid tribute to her, “My feminist guardian angels.” That remark was typically generous and exactly backwards. Varda herself, who died in March 2019 at the age of 90, was the guardian angel. From her early days as a pioneer of the French New Wave to the retrospective biographical work, Varda by Agnès, completed in the final year of her life, the Belgian-born French director created resonant heroines, used innovative cinematic techniques and inspired other women filmmakers. No wonder she was beloved in old age, an unmistakable presence, her white hair ringed with red. And no surprise that she has six titles in the BBC poll of the greatest films made by women, more than any other director.

Read more about BBC Culture’s 100 greatest films directed by women:

Cléo from 5 to 7, number two in the poll, was only her second feature, but it is pure Varda. No one else would have taken such a simple, dismal-sounding premise – a woman waiting over the course of two hours for the results of a biopsy – and turned it into a film that is playful, charming and haunting. Cléo is also the very definition of a masterpiece. Released in 1962, 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.

The film follows Cléo, a pop singer with some modest fame, as she tries to distract herself while waiting for her scheduled call to the doctor. The two-hour wait plays out almost in real time, as the film lasts 90 minutes. Varda was always concise, never self-indulgent. She employs a realism that is graceful on the surface, with deep philosophical underpinnings, poetic yet unpretentious (perhaps one reason she was undervalued for her New Wave contributions for so long). The camera glides across Paris, shot in rich black and white. And as Cléo takes taxis and cars, buys a hat, stops by a café for a brandy, Varda uses these everyday events to explore her inner life.

We share Cléo’s perspective and feel every turn of her emotions as she veers back and forth between fear and hope, while trying to kill time. That intimate look at a woman’s life and heart, her worries about career and romance, set Varda’s work apart from that of her male contemporaries. Cléo has a handsome lover, seen briefly, who doesn’t pay enough attention to her. One of her songs is playing on the radio of a taxi, but the driver doesn’t recognise her. Women today can relate.

Inner lives

Corinne Marchand, who plays Cléo, was never again in anything as important, but she is magnificently suited here. Cléo is admittedly vain and spoiled, yet her self-awareness and insecurities make her sympathetic. Most important, we see her changing moods. She may briefly forget the very real spectre of death, but we see her face cloud over when she remembers.

Varda never loses sight of the fact that Cléo is trying to distract herself, though – and what diversions! The film is full of buoyant, witty moments that are more potent today than they were all those decades ago. Cléo’s composer friend, Bob, comes to her apartment. He is played by Michel Legrand, later famous as the composer of lush film scores. Here he has an engaging goofiness as he tries to cheer Cléo up. (Legrand also wrote the score, more romantic than in other Varda films.) Bob brings Cléo a song about a break-up, which she sings while he plays the piano. But when she gets to the part about a woman who feels she will die without her lover, Cléo recalls that actual death is looming and has to escape. She takes off the elaborate fake curls piled stylishly on her head, stripping down emotionally as well, as she heads out to walk the city streets.

Her walk leads to the film’s most playful interlude, brilliantly tucked in. Cléo watches a short, silent, slapstick film in which a man in dark glasses and a boater hat runs around antically. He is played by the ultra serious New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, and the woman he is chasing is his then-wife, the actress Anna Karina, friends of Varda’s. Godard, known even now for hiding behind dark glasses (and for his often inscrutable films), takes them off as the title card says, “My glasses made everything black!” The comic episode lifts Cléo’s spirits and adds humour to the film, whether you recognise the players and get the inside joke or not, and it now stands as a tiny piece of film history.

Varda’s bigger contribution to cinema is especially clear in a stunning scene in which Cléo walks down the street, and we see a rush of images at the same time as she does, some in her memory, some before her eyes. She recalls Bob and, in ominous close-up, the face of the woman who read Tarot cards for her at the start of the film. She passes women in housedresses carrying loaves of bread home for dinner. She recalls a lovely clock with a toy monkey perched on top of it, suggesting the randomness of time itself. Close-ups of faces, life on the streets, and the meaningful weight of objects would become recurring patterns in Varda’s films. Here they also beautifully evoke the overload of Cléo’s thoughts.

When she meets a young soldier about to go off to fight in Algeria, they share their worries, bolster each other’s hopes, and confide in each other the way people who meet fleetingly can. “Today everything amazes me,” Cléo tells him, “The people’s faces next to mine.” Her sense of life has been intensified by her brush with death, and she emerges less vain, less isolated and more engaged. But that eyes-wide-open intensity is always present in Varda’s films, even when they are as varied in form as drama, documentary, and autobiography.

In her Oscar-acceptance speech, Varda allowed herself a moment of pride about the way she let her imagination roam and tried innovative techniques in her films, including a few that have now landed among the 100 greatest by women. “I tried to work to get the essence of cinema – finding different structures for each film,” she remarked, noting the use ofreal time in Cléo; the long tracking shots in Vagabond (number 13), her moving 1985 story of a rootless young woman traipsing through the countryside; the real-life people in her 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I (number 31). She could have gone on but did not mention her deceptively sunny-looking 1965 story of marital infidelity, Le Bonheur (number 28), her bold feminist drama from 1977, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (number 85) or her eloquent, biographical The Beaches of Agnès from 2008 (number 89).

Cléo is finally getting its due as a film that deserves to stand beside Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Godard’s Breathless as New Wave classics. In Faces, Places, her 2017 Oscar-nominated documentary made with the artist JR, Varda tries to take the younger man to visit Godard, who rudely snubs her with a note on the door turning them away. She feels personally hurt in that moment yet throughout her career she never seemed to mind (at least not out loud) about competing with her contemporaries for acclaim. She was not part of their boys’ club. She simply created her own, independent path.

“I feel I’m dancing,” she said as she ended her Oscar speech, taking a little sidestep and raising her arms in the air like wings. “The dance of cinema.” And she exited the stage, leaving behind an angelic legacy.

Read more about BBC Culture’s 100 greatest films directed by women:

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