Aujourd'hui, tout m'étonne.
The mask She wears
Released in 1962, we follow our protagonist, Cléo, through the streets of Paris while she waits for the results of her medical exams. During this time we accompany Cléo in her anguish and existential dread as the audience experiences the city around her through sounds, snippets of conversations, and her meetings with other people. The film itself is a portrait of a woman during just two hours of her life. In the beginning, we see her with her proverbial mask on but then witness the string of events that push her to slowly take it off. Or rather, the film forces us to remain with her long enough to truly see the woman behind the beauty, make-up, and accessories.
While there's tons to unpack from this one movie, I really see this snapshot of womanhood in general. Despite having been released in 1962, this film touches on themes that women today can relate to. What jumped out at me where the following three conflicts between our protagonist which ultimately reflect the plight of the modern woman:
1) woman and her relationship with the world around her is strained due to the material and aesthetic demands
2) woman and her relationship with the people around her who often see her as a spoiled, capricious child, and
3) woman and her relationship with her own body which she hides due to rules of propriety.
Throughout the movie, these conflicts are highlighted through her meetings with friends, exchanges with them, and her own thoughts which the audience can sometimes hear.
At the beginning of the film, we meet Cléo at the tarot reader's office where we learn that she is filled with anxiety about her possible cancer diagnosis. She leaves the office more worried than when she came in but makes time to admire herself in the lobby before leaving the building. She thinks to herself:
Minute beau papillon: être laide, c'est ça la mort. Tant que je suis belle, je suis vivante et dix fois plus que les autres.
To be ugly is tantamount to death. To be beautiful, on the other hand, is tantamount to being more alive (ten times in fact) than everyone else. This thought that Cléo has to herself represents a woman's dependence on beauty for survival. While she uses this to console herself, she is also frustrated by the consequences of such dependence, which is to be seen and perceived as spoiled and capricious like a coddled child. She revels in the benefits of beauty which gives her the privilege of being spoiled and capricious but is also paradoxically frustrated by them but her frustration is key.
The masks comes off
Her frustration shows when her musician friends come to visit her to introduce new songs. Some songs are playful and superfluous, but "Sans toi" by Michel Legrand is a less cheerful number with macabre themes about mortality. Being reminded of her anguish through the lyrics and becoming acutely aware of how she is treated by her peers, she exclaims:
Capricious, capricious. All you ever say is that I'm capricious. [...] Either I'm an idiot or a china doll... you upset me to exploit me."
In my opinion, this was a turning point in the film because her anger pushes her to finally take off her wig and leave it hanging on the mirror of her vanity, revealing her natural hair. She then switches out of her white robe and house slippers and slips into a black dress which, I thought, all symbolize a more authentic Cléo emerging at this point of the story. She is no longer merely pretending to be a sweet young woman, but showing the true darkness of her worries which essentially makes her a more complex woman in all her sweetness and dread.
She then visits her friend Dorothée who is a nude model for a local sculpture artist. Here we see another dynamic in the film, that of Cléo versus the female body. When Cléo asks Dorothée how she can display herself so freely, her friend explains to Cléo that she doesn't feel strange posing in front of strangers because it's as if she were not herself. Or even there.
They're seeing in me something other than me. A shape, an idea. I don't know. It's as if I wasn't there. As if I were asleep.
From this point on, the motif of nakedness is prevalent until the end of the film. In the end, she meets a soldier on leave to whom she confides her anxiety, her fears, and her possible illness. Cléo asks her new friend Antoine "Have you ever been in love?" to which he answers:
Many times, but not as deeply as I wanted to because of the girls. You know how they are, they love and actually only want to be loved. They are afraid of everything. To lose themselves. They half-love to save themselves. Their bodies are like toys. It's not their life.
Whereas up until now, all the characters she met revealed a dimension of Cléo’s inner self, Antoine seems to be the first character who is in direct contrast to her. His character brings a much-needed lightness to the existential dread that Cléo had been feeling throughout the film, throughout almost 2 hours in the film universe, with his playful words and friendly demeanor, but most notably his view of nakedness. "Nakedness is an indiscretion, it's the night, it's an illness", Cléo says. Antoine disagrees. For him, nakedness is:
... like summer, everyone should have it. When one is naked, it's simple; its love, birth, dawn. The sun, the beach, all that. [...] I'm touched by nudity. Even a striptease, while exciting, is also very moving.
At this point in the film, we've gone from seeing a very done-up Cléo shopping at a boutique to a more dressed down Cléo in the natural open space of a park; from Cléo taking taxis to Cléo taking the bus like everyone else, from places full of mirrors to someplace without any mirrors (the park), from her dramatic expressions of emotion that contribute to superficial exchanges to more sincere expressions of thought and opinion that contribute to more genuine interactions. This film poses the question "Who are we beneath the surface?" or rather "Who is the woman beneath the surface?" while not neglecting the fact that Cléo is only one of many in the sea that is 1960s Paris.
Cléo's character arc is subtle, but her transformation is evident at the end of the film. At the beginning of the film, she tries to console herself with her beauty, but throughout the story, her anxiety about a possible cancer diagnosis seems to cause her to peel off the artificial layers from herself until she arrives at the core of who she is, indeed, like a newborn baby. The film juxtaposes anxiety about death with the giddiness of renaissance. In the end, she decides to "get on with it". What makes this film rather marvelous is that it’s not the typical hero’s journey that takes a plethora of time or even a full day. The film is about only two hours of her day!
Conclusion
All in all, it was a lovely film. Playful, empathetic, and charming from beginning to end. The film echoed what English critic, John Berger, wrote about male and female presence in his book "Ways of Seeing" ten years after this film was released. He writes:
...men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
Agnès Varda put his now famous analysis into film in Cléo 5 to 7 a decade before Berger ever set pen to paper! Indeed, the men in the film do look at women while Cléo is looking at herself to make sure she looks as she should. It is as if Cléo objectifies herself, too, in order to become an object of vision and ultimately, a sight to be admired. The whole purpose of the film, then, seems to be to humanise Cléo to herself and to the world at large as a woman who is not just a sight for sore eyes but a woman with complexities and many different layers.
Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave)
The Nouvelle Vague style of cinema, also known in English as French New Wave, is lauded for breaking the rules of cinema of its time. It got its start in post-WWII France by the "Young Turks" who were made up of Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivettes, and Claude Chabrol. They aimed to break free of the stifling rules of continuity, rules of matching, and establishing shots that dominated cinema up until then in order to provide a more sincere cinema that would capture the true culture of post-war France. However, Agnès Varda was not part of this "Right Bank" of Nouvelle Vague. She formed part of the "Left Bank Group" which was an offshoot of Nouvelle Vague (sometimes known as Nouvelle Vague 2). Be that as it may, the style and technique attributed to French New Wave cinema, whether Right or Left, can be found in Cléo 5 to 7 in which the camera glides across different sceneries of Paris in long takes and the editing is discontinuous if not at times abrupt to name a couple.