About half way through “Cleo from 5 to 7,” so we’ll place her at about 6:00 PM in the movie’s timeline, the singer Cleo is rehearsing in her luxurious, yet empty loft with her composer and her songwriter. They offer comic relief as she claims to feel sick, and they work through a collection of diddys that would delight another audience. She listens in bemusement, and her charm, after lamenting if she’s going to be diagnosed with cancer, after nasal gazing at her own beauty and laying sweet nothings on her bland lover, has almost run out.
But in an instant, the composer begins to play a song called “Cry of Love.” The camera slowly swivels around the piano as Cleo starts to sing. A figurative black curtain drops and Cleo is isolated in her moment of pain and passion. An orchestra swells, and the moment does not show her pretension as earlier, but her utter vulnerability and transformation. This little aria is absolutely haunting, so emotional that she can’t even bring herself to finish.
This might just be one of the finest scenes in all of French New Wave cinema. But it works so perfectly because it catches you off guard, the transformation seems to happen in real-time, and the simple reality of its staging combined with a subtle and noticeable unreality is a true miracle.
“Cleo from 5 to 7” carries through on that sensation throughout its duration. Its director, Agnes Varda, is one of the lesser known members of the French New Wave pantheon, and this is her earliest masterpiece at the height of an era. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Cleo from 5 to 7”