Agnès Varda
(1928, France)
By Līva Pētersone
Pop singer Cleo – short for Cleopatra, her real name Florence (played by Corinne Marchand) wanders around the 1960s Paris as she awaits crucial medical test results. By chronicling two hours in the heroine’s life (compressing them to 1hour and 29 minutes in film’s actual time), Agnès Varda has created a stunning double-portrait in time: a woman and a city. The film is a mirror of the 1960s exciting experimentation in film and one of the most dazzling and profound examples of French New Wave cinema, as timely and topical today in its film language and subject matter as it was half a century ago. By the way, it might have been Varda’s sex which prevented her from becoming one of the established members of the famous boy’s club of Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Resnais, Rohmer, Rivette, and even her husband Jacques Demy.
By exploring the question: how a woman is seen by the world and how does she see the world herself - Cleo from 5 to 7 charts the evolution of the titular character – from an object of male desire, a sex kitten to-be-looked-at to a personality who dares to look herself. The journey through the city – the ravishing visual focal point of the film – reflects the inner journey of a woman transformed. A brilliant mix of genres, the film merges melodrama with the realism of cinéma vérité (testimony to Varda’s background as a photojournalist and documentarian), with Parisians looking right at her camera and thus – at Cleo and us.
The trademarks of La Nouvelle Vague - jump cuts, city as a character, cafés, liberty and foray into the unknown, references to political unrest, war, existentialist themes of solitude and mortality, are joined by perhaps the most prominent of them all – quotation: the silent black and white short film that Cleo watches at the cinema features Godard and his wife and muse Anna Karina, as well as the star of Le Beau Serge and other La Nouvelle Vague masterpieces, Jean-Claude Brialy, the dashing Bob the pianist is played by the film’s composer Michel Legrand (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg).
Wednesday October 23, Kino Bize, 21.00-22.30