Cléo de 5 à 7: Cléo’s Personality, Varda as a Feminist Auteur, Time, Ending

The following analysis was submitted for an informal film journal assignment Junior year.

Cléo’s Personality

Cléo’s personality is a perfect instance of art cinema’s focus on capturing the multidimensionality of a human being. Cléo’s personality does not necessarily function on a binary, but is rather framed by context in a way that emphasizes a multifaceted relativism. While she is overwhelmingly a petulant, self-absorbed celebrity, she also experiences love and suffering in a way that might lead some spectators to identify with her. Her vanity is largely expressed through the film’s use of mirrors. For example, in one scene, she tries on a polka-dotted dress and the camera moves to a close-up of Cléo checking her face in the mirror, where she states, “everything suits me, trying things on intoxicates me”. Yet, the film frames a conceited presentation of Cléo with a constant highlighting of her motivations and struggles. As Cléo awaits her biopsy results, she becomes increasingly more introspective about the world around her, as if she is becoming ever-more aware of her own mortality. Even small instances of her self-awareness and awareness of people around her demonstrate this shift in personality. In the beginning of the film, Cléo avoids a crowded intersection by pushing past a crowd and stopping traffic. This scene is paralleled by a later scene where she tries to cross a similar intersection, yet no one bats an eye or moves out of the way when she tries to push past them. Her confidence and sense of self-power diminishes throughout the film in favor of an almost anxious introspectiveness, exacerbated by temporal and corporeal concerns. Furthermore, I struggled to pinpoint whether she genuinely did love attention, or whether her vanity was more so dependent on context. While on one hand she loves attention and desires to be recognized for her fame by complete strangers, she simultaneously dismisses the male gaze at times. As she struts down the street in one scene, we see the male gaze in a very literal sense as the camera aligns with the men staring at her walking. Yet, Cléo’s assistant shoots her a look that seemed to acknowledge Cléo’s discomfort. I believe the film ultimately highlights Cléo’s devolving perception of personality, self-assurance, love, and death as she ultimately moves towards the idea of loving someone other than herself. 

Varda as a Feminist Auteur

Auteurship describes the way that a director's involvement in the film embodies an artistic and personal influence so great that it essentially positions them as the author of the movie. Auteurship is problematic in the sense that it neglects the other contributors to the film and overemphasizes heterosexual, white male directors. If Varda is a feminist auteur, then I think the feminism she projects into the narrative is somewhat postfeminist in nature. Postfeminism is prone to critique, but I do think it captures the movement away from binary thinking and essentialism. Cléo is not marked by essentialism, but rather presented in a complex and oftentimes contradictory light. Though she is young and conventionally attractive, her youthful beauty does not shield her from darker, realistic entanglements with death. The film paints her humanistically, deconstructing her sensationalization over its duration. I think the choice to cast a beautiful, young Corinne Marchand makes her struggles with disease more jarring. Furthermore, Varda positions Cléo as a pedestrian in Paris during an era where women walking solo through the streets might have been deemed taboo. I am not sure whether this was intentional, but it felt like an expression of female rebellion to a degree. Varda explores Cléo’s subjectivity through an increasing demonstration of her pluralism. She is vain, but becomes more aware. Her self-love fluxes and shifts towards outward love. Formal shifts help characterize some of Cléo’s transformative shifts. The beginning of the film many medium length and long shots that track Cléo’s movement across the screen and through the streets. These shots situate her in the spectator’s gaze as we succumb to and participate in the gaze she seems to desire. We even get long shots of her in her bedroom wearing lingerie, which seem to fetishize her appearance to the viewer. Yet, these onlooking formal elements shift in favor of point of view shots as the film progresses. Varda grants us more of Cléo’s perspective in small moments, such as when she sits in the back of the driver’s car, observing the back of his head. It seems as though this shift not only emphasizes her increasing capacity to introspect about others, but also to introspect about her own positioning in the world. She turns away from being the object of scrutiny in favor of scrutinizing about those in the world around her. Her conventionally feminine, objectified identity becomes pluralistic in nature, indicating that there is more than attractiveness and femininity that the spectator should evaluate in determining her likability. Yet, it also left me thinking about why we seek to measure a female character’s likability in the first place. By situating Cléo as a complex, multifaceted character, Varda seems to be challenging the binary conception of femininity in a manner reminiscent of postfeminist ideologies. 

Time

Diegetically, the film is two hours long. The film’s screen time is about an hour and a half. When Cléo sits with the tarot card reader in the beginning, the reader pulls the Death card out as a clock subtly ticks, setting the two hours into motion. The film is segmented by chapter titles, each indicating the elapsed time in the diegesis. The chapter titles are rather random; some occur as she walks down the street, while others occur several moments after she moves to a new location. Yet, the minute-by-minute imprecision does not seem to matter as the two hour window looms overhead. Making the diegesis short also highlights Cléo’s suspense in receiving her test results and underscores how long two hours can feel, given the circumstances. The film’s diegetical and geographic bounds are limited, placing a greater significance on each small moment in Cléo’s life; each small moment–regardless of how mundane–has greater importance when life becomes numbered. When Cléo flirts with the soldier and speaks to him about how little time they have left before he returns to war, she seems to be speaking about the potential lack of time left in her own life. Finally, the time makes Cléo’s two hour journey feel more palpable and immediate to the spectator. Varda could have chosen any time in any place, yet the specificity of Cleo in Paris during a distinct time frame functions to constrain Cléo’s abstract shifts in sentiments and identity. The film places an emphasis on the boundlessness of Cléo’s identity that is only contained by the highly-specific bounds of diegetic time. I understood this as signifying not a woman’s tendency for capriciousness over short time spans, but rather a woman’s capacity to embody complex, nuanced emotions even within a constrained temporal and spatial moment. 

Ending

Cléo and her soldier lover go to the hospital to get her results, realize the doctor has left, then see the doctor in his car. He gives her optimistic news about her biopsy. The camera moves with the doctor’s car as he drives away. Cléo and the soldier make plans to be together the following evening and she states that she is happy. The doctor’s role in the film is tied with Cléo’s apprehension about her fate. When he leaves the screen, this apprehension simultaneously dissolves. Thus, we are forced to speculate on what the conglomeration of small, pre-death moments in the diegesis meant to Cléo in light of their reorientation as mundane moments in her unthreatened life. Would the hours between 5 and 7 look different if she knew she was not going to die? Will the emotional growth she underwent during the two hours stick with her? Did she actually change at all or did the film just depict her multifaceted identity too singularly in the first place? What if the moments of vanity and narcissism in the beginning of the film were just a narrowly-depicted hour where she was acting particularly narcissistic? The spectator only knows Cléo as constrained by time and fear of death, but who is she beyond this? The ending is ambivalent, but I believe it is purposefully ambivalent. The soldier does not know about Cléo’s impending biopsy results when they meet and has his own emotional worries about returning to war. Yet, he speaks with a level of respectful restraint that almost assumes Cléo, like anyone else, has emotional baggage of her own. Despite the uncertainty about what Cléo’s life was before these two hours and what it will be after these two hours, we know Cléo is–for at least a temporal moment–happy. I think Varda wants us to question whether the entire two hours was pointless. What did I gain from an hour and a half of watching a woman running around town thinking she is going to die? Honestly, I have been sitting here for a very long time trying to come up with an answer, but I think that’s the point. I almost feel as if it’s not my place to ascribe meaning to the ending because that would mean assigning meaning to Cléo’s identity. Just as the title slides do not necessarily demarcate beginnings and ends of scenes, I do not think the ending signals an ending. This is common for French New-Wave films, emphasizing not only the multifaceted and uncertain identities that characters can play in films, but also signifying the plurality of humanity (specifically women, in this case). I think a straightforward ending would undercut the greater point that nothing, especially the life of another human, is really clear cut or conducive to being singularly defined.