The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Agnès Varda · Cléo de 5 à 7 · a film in French · 1962 · about 90 minutes
Mode
Chamber drama of one woman turned into the street; a study of attention in near real time
Mythos
Death and the Maiden in a modern Paris; the tarot’s Death read as transformation; Narcissus at the mirror set against the street
Phase
One afternoon, from about five o’clock to about half past six, the summer solstice, from the tarot reading to the hospital grounds
Presentation
Feature film, about 90 minutes, in French; a colour prologue and thirteen black and white chapters, each opened by an intertitle naming a character and a span of minutes; one song performed whole and a silent burlesque shown within
Register
Studio-lit interiors and mirrors in the first half, the handheld and documentary street in the second; Legrand’s piano, a jukebox, a taxi radio
Scale
One woman, ninety minutes, a city and a war at its edge
Governing Proposition
A singer waits through an afternoon in Paris for the result of a biopsy, and the film keeps the clock in front of her. The wager of the film is that the fear of death and the condition of being an object of the gaze are one fear, that a woman made of being looked at can learn to look, and that a feature film told in very nearly real time, cut into clocked chapters, can make the viewer wait in the minutes with her.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in colour, and from above. A tarot reader lays out cards on a table, and the camera looks down on them as they fall. The woman who has come to her is Cléo, a young singer, and she is waiting for the result of a medical test. The cards are read, and among them is Death. The reader says it means transformation, and the film will hold her to that. Then the colour goes, and the rest of the film is in black and white.
What follows is set to a clock. Thirteen chapters run on, each opened by an intertitle that names a character and a span of minutes, the first of them Cléo’s, from 17h05 to 17h08. Some are named for others, Angèle, Bob, Dorothée, Antoine, and for those minutes the view passes to them. The title promises two hours; the action runs from about five to about half past six, very near real time, and the film runs about ninety minutes. Every chapter heading is a countdown.
Agnès Varda wrote and directed it, and it was released in France in 1962 and shown in competition at Cannes that year. Georges de Beauregard and Carlo Ponti produced it, Jean Rabier photographed it, and Michel Legrand wrote the music and plays Bob, the composer. Corinne Marchand is Cléo, Antoine Bourseiller is Antoine, Dominique Davray is Angèle, Dorothée Blank is Dorothée, Serge Korber is the lyricist Plumitif and José Luis de Vilallonga is José. One cut circulates, and it is the film.
Movement II
Cléo goes down to a café, where Angèle is waiting. A mirrored pillar multiplies her, and she studies herself in it. Her talk is of her face and of what the cards said, and the café goes on around her. In the first half of the film the camera mostly meets her this way, through glass, as a thing to be looked at that also looks at itself.
In a hat shop on the rue de Rivoli side of the city she tries on hats before the mirrors, admired by herself and by the shop. It is the day of the summer solstice, and she is dressing for it as for a show. A taxi takes the two women home; the radio plays, the driver talks, and the city passes outside the windows, still a backdrop. The film lets these minutes run as texture, and the clock in the next intertitle moves on regardless.
In her flat José comes, the man who keeps her, and goes again. He is not there even while he is there. Cléo is a possession, admired and housed, and nobody in this half of the film listens to her fear. What the mirrors have shown and José confirms is a life lived entirely as an image held for others.
Movement III
Bob the composer and Plumitif the lyricist arrive to rehearse her new songs, and the work is a trade in her voice. Then Bob sits at the piano and she sings “Sans toi”, a song with words by Varda and music by Legrand. The camera closes on her against black, the piano swells, the room falls away, and the pop number she was to sell turns on her. It becomes an accusation and a lament for herself.
It breaks her. She will not go on with the rehearsal. She pulls off the wig, puts on black and goes out alone. The film turns at this point, and it turns its form with her: mirrors and interiors before the song, the street and open air after it. From here the camera has the freedom she takes.
Outside, Paris is no longer a backdrop. The street is shot as a documentary street, and the faces in it look back at her and at the lens. In Le Dôme in Montparnasse she plays her own record on the jukebox, and nobody in the room hears it. The singer who was all surface walks unseen through a city she is, for the first time, looking at.
Movement IV
Cléo goes to a sculptor’s studio, where her friend Dorothée poses as a model, unashamed of her body and at ease in being looked at. Being seen is work for her, and it does not consume her. The two women drive off together. Dorothée’s mirror is broken, and the woman who lived in mirrors sees one in pieces.
They stop at a cinema, and from the projection booth they watch a silent burlesque short, played by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina among others. In it a man puts on dark glasses and the world turns to mourning; he takes them off and the world comes back. It is a joke, and it is the film’s argument in small: how one looks makes the world one sees.
This is the slackest stretch of the film. The drive and the studio lose tension, and the booth carries its point a little longer than it needs. But none of it is idle. The broken mirror, the glasses and a woman at ease in her body all bear on Cléo, and when she leaves Dorothée she goes alone toward the park.
Movement V
In the Parc Montsouris a stranger speaks to her. He is Antoine, a soldier on leave from Algeria, going back that night. They talk, and she tells him her real name, Florence. The name of the singer was a role, and with the first man who looks at her without wanting to own the image she gives it up. A second death enters the film here, his, carried lightly and exactly: a soldier who may die in a war nobody names aloud.
They go by bus to the Salpêtrière hospital, where her result is to be had, and wait in the grounds. The doctor gives his news from a car: she is ill, and she must be treated. The news she dreaded comes, and it does not destroy her.
The film ends on the two faces in the light, and her saying that she is no longer afraid. The relief comes very quickly, and the ending has been called too easy. It is the film’s argument made literal: she is told she is ill and she is no longer afraid, because she has stopped being only seen. The clock has not reached seven. The two hours of the title end early, in a garden, with someone looking back.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is the clock. Each chapter takes a few minutes of a woman’s wait for a biopsy result, and almost every one moves her a step from object toward subject: the tarot sets the fear; the hat shop and the mirrors show her living as a thing looked at; José’s visit shows that the man who keeps her is absent even when present; the rehearsal breaks her when her own song becomes an accusation; then the wig comes off and the city, Dorothée and Antoine follow. Few chapters could go without loss. What could be shortened is the middle: the drive and the studio with Dorothée, and the projection booth, which carries its point a little longer than it needs. The taxi radio and the café chatter are texture rather than step.
Score: 8.5 / 10
What the film brings into the open can be stated and holds: a woman whose self is made of being looked at, faced with a death she cannot be looked out of, learns to look. In the first half the camera meets Cléo through mirrors, and her talk is of her face. After the song she walks, and the film turns its gaze outward with hers: faces in the street that stare back, a café deaf to her record on the jukebox, a model easy in her body, a soldier going back to a war. The fear of death and the condition of being an object are shown to be one fear. Held below the top because the social disclosure, the war and the city, stays at the edge of the personal one.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The film is quiet by design, and its heights are few and sure. The first is “Sans toi”: the camera closes on Cléo against black as Legrand’s piano swells, the room falls away, and a pop number becomes a lament for herself, one of the great sung passages of the decade’s cinema. The second is the long walk after she leaves the flat, in which the documentary Paris of the street rises toward exaltation because she is seeing it for the first time. The third is the close at the hospital, two faces in the light and her relief at being told she must be treated, a lift made of almost nothing. Between these the film runs low by choice. The height is real; the frequency is moderate, and frequency counts.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The archetype is constructed, not only evoked, but it is a small one. The tarot is load-bearing: the Death card is read as transformation, and the film enacts the reading, the death of Cléo the singer and the coming of Florence, the real name she gives to Antoine. The structure is Death and the Maiden worked through a modern Paris, a beautiful woman shadowed by death through an afternoon. The name carries Cleopatra and Clio, the muse of history; the day is the solstice, the turn of the year; the mirrors set Narcissus against the street. These are woven well, but some remain allusion, Clio and the solstice among them, and the particular never becomes a figure the culture carries as it carries the Tramp. Held below the gate for that.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The departures are of structure and of subject. Structure: a feature in near real time, cut into clocked chapters that hand the view to other people for minutes at a time, with a colour prologue and a silent burlesque inside it. Nothing in the commercial cinema of 1962 looked like it, and the New Wave films beside it ran on genre, the gangster picture in Breathless, where this runs on a clock and an illness. Subject: a woman’s interior given the whole film, made by a woman director inside the industry on a producer’s money. The cost was real: a small budget, street crowds that look back at the lens, a heroine vain and unsympathetic for half the film. Varda’s own La Pointe Courte (1955) had made the earlier turn, and that discounts this one by a little.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. The near real time is the knowledge: waiting for a diagnosis is lived as minutes, and the viewer is made to wait in them. The clocked intertitles keep death in the frame, every chapter heading a countdown, and the hand-off of chapters to Angèle, Bob or Dorothée shows Cléo as others see her, which is the condition the film is about. The form turns at the hinge: mirrors and interiors before the song, street and open air after it, so that the camera’s freedom is her freedom. Told as a day in ellipsis it would be a melodrama of illness; told this way it is a study of attention. Held below the top because the middle chapters loosen the form’s grip for a stretch.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Six decades of return have kept yielding. Feminist film criticism has read it as the founding case of a woman passing from object of the gaze to its subject, and others have read its Paris as a map, from the Rivoli side to Montparnasse to the Salpêtrière, its Algeria as the war French cinema kept off the screen, its songs as an essay on the commodity voice, its burlesque as a key to the whole. The mirrors, the hat, the broken mirror, the jukebox scene and the last exchange with the doctor reward close viewing. Two limits hold the axis down. Much of the return circles one meaning, the gaze, and the film is small enough that its pairings are found within a few viewings.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1960s. The intrinsic force is high: the film showed that a woman’s consciousness, in real time, could be the whole subject of a feature, and that the New Wave’s freedom of the street could serve interiority rather than play with genre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real but delayed and indirect, running through feminist cinema and criticism from the 1970s on, with Chantal Akerman’s real-time study of a woman’s day the descendant usually named, and through the many films that clock a single afternoon. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Beside it, Breathless (9.3) and L’Avventura (8.8) redirected more of what followed, and the figure stands below the gate for that.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and surface across sixty-four years. The form survives whole: one version, the colour prologue intact, restored by Ciné-Tamaris, its own production house, with nothing lost or replaced. Presence has been continuous in France and in teaching, thinner in English-language circulation through the 1970s to the 1990s than that of the most famous films of its decade, and much wider since the restoration and Varda’s late standing. The surface is the pop-music milieu and the fashions of 1961, but the film made them its subject, a woman built of a period’s surfaces, rather than leaning on them, and they have not dated its meaning. Credited at the usual figure for that span, not the widest.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The making is fine and load-bearing in places. Jean Rabier’s black and white carries both registers, the studio-lit interiors of the first half and the handheld, hidden-camera street of the second, without a seam. Michel Legrand’s score and the staging of “Sans toi”, one movement in and the set dropped to black, are the film’s best making. The cutting keeps the clock honest and the chapter hand-offs clean. Corinne Marchand’s performance moves from mannered to open in step with the film, which is the point, though the early vanity is played broad. The costs: some secondary playing, José and the café extras, is thin, and the Dorothée stretch loses tension in its staging. It is not the total command of the medium the top of the axis requires.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law governs: the gaze and the clock. Take the two most distant elements, the colour tarot prologue and the silent burlesque in the projection booth. Both obey it. The first is death foretold as a reading of images; the second is a comedy in which dark glasses turn the world to mourning and taking them off restores it, a joke that is the film’s argument in small. The documentary street and the studio interiors obey the same law, since what changes between them is how Cléo looks, and Antoine’s war fits it as the second death that waits by the clock. A tenth or two is lost because the middle chapters at times seem to wander from the law, and because the closing relief is reached very quickly.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what a film of about ninety minutes holds, through one consciousness: the body and illness, death, vanity and the self, love as a kept woman’s arrangement, labour in the song trade, the model, the projectionist and the taxi driver, friendship, the city, and through Antoine the state at war. The sacred enters only through the tarot and superstition. The orders are present and joined, not listed. What holds the axis lowest: the state and history are kept at the edge, in a radio bulletin and a soldier’s leave, and the scale of the film is the afternoon of one woman. A small form, well filled; the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.8, then The Unconcealment and The Imperishable at 8.7. A form in which waiting for a diagnosis is lived as minutes, every chapter heading a countdown and the camera’s freedom turning with the heroine’s; a disclosure that the fear of death and the condition of being an object are one fear; and a film that survives whole in its one version, its period surface made its subject.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: illness, death, the self, a kept woman’s love, labour, friendship and the city are joined through one consciousness, but the state and history are kept at the edge, in a radio bulletin and a soldier’s leave, and the scale is one afternoon. Above it, The Sublime at 8.2, heights few and sure and the frequency moderate by design, and The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3: a myth built but small, and a reach real but delayed.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: The Unconcealment at 8.7, The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 fall two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.4 from a sum of 101.3, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) as released in France in 1962, in its one circulating cut, about 90 minutes, black and white with a colour prologue, from the tarot reading to the hospital grounds: written and directed by Agnès Varda, produced by Georges de Beauregard and Carlo Ponti, photographed by Jean Rabier, with music by Michel Legrand; with Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray, Dorothée Blank, Serge Korber, José Luis de Vilallonga and Michel Legrand. The restoration by Ciné-Tamaris repairs the image and bears on The Imperishable only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the French film; English subtitles are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. No line of dialogue is held to the word, so none is quoted, and speech is described; the song “Sans toi” is named, not quoted. Details that could not be verified, among them the editing credit, the year of the restoration, the calendar date of the film’s day, the sources Varda named for it, the film’s place in recent critics’ polls, the duration of each chapter, the shot count and the full cast of the burlesque short, are not given.