Giulia Dobre- OMAGIU
"Cleo from 5 to 7": when the Goddess turns into a pumpkin.
Agnes Varda was interested to put in question the cinematic structures and the constructions of sexuality as complex social process. The problematic of VISION and of FEMININE DESIRE have always assumed a central role in her films, from "Opera-Mouffe"(1958) to "Vagabond"(1985) and further. But beyond that, Varda tried to investigate, in a distinct way from Godard, the process of the creation of images. As a result, she presents femininity as a complex intersection between social and cinematic representations.
Varda said:"I learned to seek my language, and not only my style. I always attempt to utilize the PLASTIC vocabulary of the Cinema before my ideas about the film are firmly fixed in words. I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don't want to SHOW things, but to give people the desire to SEE. But it is not simply the fact of seeing, or of seeing cinematically; Varda is committed to exploring the feminist dialectic of the woman seeing/ the woman seen. The woman both as subject and object of vision, of desire. The vision of the woman and the cinematic discourse will therefore articulate in her films in a feminist cinema, constructed on the problematic of the gaze.
All her films are built on the principle of a dichotomy/and a juxtaposition. "Cleo from 5 to 7" delineates the way from objective time/to/subjective time. Even if using conventional stereotypes of female beauty and the fetishization of the star, "Cleo" explores the parameters of film language and the varied strategies of cinematic representation these suggest. Therefore she has forged a new word in Cinema:"Cinecriture", that she defines as:"...cinematic writing. Specifically that. Not illustrating a screenplay, not adapting a novel, not getting the gags of a good play. I have fought so much for something that starts from emotion , from visual and sound emotion, feeling, and finding a shape for that, and a shape that has to do with Cinema and nothing else."
Varda's main goal is to avoid the spectator's identification with the character. He has to remain cool and lucid, in a state of critical distaciation. The character of CLEO is constructed by replacing psychological depth with social complexity. The resulting judgement of the spectator involves then renunciation of emotional identification in the name of critical reflection and evaluation. Varda's reformulation of the spectatorship entails a decisive shift in the quality of the cinema look. It is not invested with traditional mechanisms of identification, but posits an erotics of vision not bound by the gender hierarchy of the gaze. For in all Varda's films looking itself is pleasurable, especially in "Cleo".
At a first level, the film is about a young singer who makes a spiritual journey during the few hours when she awaits for the results of a vital test. Travelling through Paris
Varda had an interesting comment about the feminist undertones of her initiatic journey:
"...For her identity, Cleo had only the look of the others. She is the cliche-woman:tall, blond, beautiful,voluptuous. The whole dynamic of the film lies in showing this woman at the moment when she refuses to be this cliche, tearing off its attributes: wig, feathered robe, etc. , when she wants to do the looking herself. She goes and looks at the others. From the object of the look, she becomes the subject who looks. She establishes a dialogue with a soldier, whom she wouldn't have even noticed before, or only as an intruder, a bother. That's quite a bit, this man-woman rapport which is not simply eroticism, relations of force, social game or sexist comedy. "...
A documentary approach to daily parisian activity is combined here with the poetic of formal harmonies in the same way that the "Objective" views of the social milieu are articulated through Cleo and her controlling subjectivity. The public and the private life are continuously interposed, in a gradual emphasis of the public concern, while Cleo's social awareness raises. It will be only when Cleo stops accepting to perceive herself as the world is seeing her that she will attain self-knowledge.
Objective time is orchestrated with the subjective time. Each minute is attentively marked, as a reminder for the spectator that extremely important transmutations are happening. Between five and seven o'clock in that afternoon Cleo's subjective sense of time expands and contracts, as she says:" We have so little time left", immediately followed by: " We've got all the time in the world". Juxtaposition is a key figure here, between beauty and death (the man eating frogs or the splashed window), between the contrast of light and dark (Cleo driven by her friend and getting in the tunnel while talking about illness), artificial and natural, summer and winter (the different seasonal hats), between musical comedy and deep drama, coquetterie and anguish.
Varda has a photographers' look on her character, and on the diegesis . As Sandie Lewis puts it, the entire transformation is centred on the question of the look. From a narcissistic reflection, Cleo will experience empathy with the others. From a spoken question to her maid , or the unspoken , but admirative gaze in the mirror of :How do I look?", Cleo turns to ask herself :" How do I see the world?', after asking "DO I SEE the world at all?!"...Completely invaded by the "text" through the world and the few persons that populated it, Cleo used to be the perfect result of the dominant patriarchal ideology. Her lover adores her, but he is older than her and nurtures more as a fatherly and rather platonic love to her, being always on the run. Their relationship is one of convenience, of going out, because Cleo bought a new dress or needs to be called "a pearl"...She poses continuously, in front oh him, as much as in front of her colleagues or even of her maid. She feels quite comfortable being objectified in the eyes of men, such as her pianist who is introducing a new song with a semi-joke as a riddle: "Cleopatre, I worship you!".
Varda explores here the depths of female sexuality and the meaning of the "narcissistic woman". They both are reversible terms, and both evolutive, such as the film states. It is important to observe that the transformation on Cleo's behaviour starts as a result of a first moment of sublime, well prefigurated by others. After the fortune-teller announces to her a "profound transformation" , "changing as suffering", "a departure and a struggle", the young woman goes in a cafe called "It comes it goes", also related o the understatement of the transformation. She will then buy a new hat, a winter hat in the middle of summertime, as a first awakening and resolution of her new threatened life. As she took the decision, glancing at herself in the fortune-tellers mirror, that beauty is life, and as long as she will be beautiful she will be "... a hundred times more alive than the others"...
But it is while rehearsing a new song with very dramatic lyrics that she will live the moment of sublime. This happens as she realizes the extent of her loneliness as a direct result of the falsity in which she lives, of the dependency on the others' impressions on her , in a context of numerous signifiers of loss. She then also understands that she has no one to seriously share with her concerns about the illness and mortality, as her lover isn't supposed to be bothered with such things-like all men shouldn't-her maid finds a solution in superstition, and her colleagues musicians laugh about her ill-being.
The camera movement and the framing are showing the integrality of Cleo as a fetishized woman image. With a semi-circular travelling it surrounds her while singing, in order to evacuate anyone else from the frame, until we see her face with a revealing and dramatic expression. The piano becomes a background sound, and we are left with a mesmerizing performance. By the end of the song, Cleo has a moment of fury against the fabricated image of her that her own colleagues were perpetrating, stating with a low voice, as a conclusion, that:"Everyone spoils me, nobody loves me." She will then strip her garnements away and get on the streets to finally SEE the world. She consumes by that her moment of sublime, acknowledging the danger, overcoming it, and finally feeling the gratification of it. From a stage of reciprocal narcissistic enclosure based on the perception of a painful lack and absence -may be even her own absence from the world- ("without you" in the song), Cleo will grasp and accept relations of inter-subjectivity , as in a social context. The spectator will be then confronted no more with images of a fixed Cleo, but with a diegetic vision, productive and fresh.
As Baudry says:"To seize movement is to become movement". Once Cleo starts to move INSIDE the world as a participant, and not anymore outside, as a frigid spectator, she will be amazed by the variety and novelty of it, alleging that:"Today everything amazes me". Her transformation will unable her to become a distinct individual, with a social constitution of her image, through the realization of death, separation and diversity. The "mirror-state" is now definitively overpassed, the pure reflection is now filled with a consciousness. Far from the scene of the woman-as-image and spectacle where she buys hats and tells herself with an almost bored voice:"Ah, everything suits me!", admired by people on the street gazing through the glass, Cleo will connote social identity in the scene of the broken glass. Along with her friend Dorothee, framed in the middle of a staring and emotional crowd, the passage of death astonishes her . Her femininity finds a natural place , this time having a vision of her own that corresponds to the others'. She will then finally SEE what all the others are seeing.
An important moment is the encounter with her friend Dorothee, a woman with self-confidence and with a generous vision of herself, of her body and her femininity. Although her profession is to pose for artists, she doesn't need their sight of her, as she knows that her woman identity doesn't come from the look, but from "somewhere beyond". Cleo is introduced in this new world of equilibrium and love by six silent shots of her entering the sculptor's atelier, when we could only hear the scraping of the tools. As these forge a new being, the new Cleo comes to life too, in a cinematic rendition of her philosophical metamorphosis of subjectivity. She will now take out her glasses, assuming her identity, after the anonymity of the first looks on the streets and in the CAfe Dome. As Dorothee has such a spontaneous way of behaving and enquiring in Cleo's life, the young singer will ultimately feel friendship and as being part of a communication. The hat that she picked up after a serious moment of thinking, a symbol of her past vanity, will be given as an acknowledgment token for this natural dialogue.
As a culminating moment in Cleo's evolution and individual revolution is the encounter with Antoine, the soldier . Her self-recognition will be achieved through this non-objectifying type of sharing, totally opposed to the conventional and fetishized relationship she had with men previously. Antoine is a clean soul and a balanced mind, with a thirst for knowing and a coherent identity, saying that:"I believe without seeing". He is to engage in a new kind of relation with Cleo, treating her as a partner in a dialogue rather than a very beautiful sex-symbol.
Textually, we see Cleo walking by the park and posing in characteristic images of femme fatale on the bridge Montsouris, singing at low voice a song only heard by her. But her gestures are of a self-parody, of a critique of female beauty conventions. Fragments of the text are audible, highlighting parts of the body that are subject to fetishization: "body", "capricious", "Blue eyes", etc. The song is the same that she heard and criticised in the taxi, the one that she chose on the juke-box at Cafe Dome, and that now is interpreted in its basic connotations, as a representation of femininity. By now we understand that she is conscious about and that she negates the fabricated image of the woman she used to be.
In this context appeared Antoine, engaging in a natural conversation with her, and rather soon arriving at the point where she confesses her dramatic awaiting. Once she declares the word"cancer", her fears will start to fade. Cleo finally retreats from the conventions of a woman talking to a man, becoming more human and communicating again, just like with Dorothee. They share and analyze aspects of life, they talk about love without false pudibondery, until extreme declarations such as Cleos' that she is afraid to love. It seams that the value of saying certain words such as "death","love", "cancer" is a liberating one, as in an exorcism. Liberating herself means accepting the others, accepting the world, accepting death and throughout it life. The two will travel by bus to the hospital and discuss attitudes toward life. Once at the hospital and once in possession of the terrific results, Cleo will be able to remain hopeful, saying that:"It seems to me that I really feel happy."
The last shot of the film leaves Cleo and Antoine staring at each other, as in a definite awareness that from now on they are to be each other's mirror, in a total communion. With the formula "Pearl and Frog-You and Me" Antoine ha scealled their rapport, symbolized by the pearl ring that combines Cleo's past identity as an objectified beauty, with her new vision of the new world. From now on Cleo assumes the will and the power of mastering both her life and her image.
Once in her new clothes of a social being and of a "tres comme il faut jeune femme", what will then prevail of the Goddess Cleo? May be , as in the words game between her maid and herself in the cab, just an IDEE...Or is it just an exquisite pumpkin? And after all, how much concern will the spectator have with following this new character, after having consumed his own part of the sublime?...
Using some of the specific tendencies of the Nouvelle Vague, such as milked images, distorted temporality, distortions of sound, interfacing of subjective realities, jump-cuts , the aspect of a research and a naturalistic acting, Agnes Varda offers the spectator a pleasurable and revealing film.
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