cléo from 5 to 7_ passionate time - from the current - the criterion collection
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Clo from 5 to 7:Passionate Time
By Adrian Martin
There have been many films, from Alfred Hitchcocks Rope(1948) to Alexander
SokurovsRussian Ark (2002), devoted to the challenge of capturing or
reconstituting the experience of real time. Agns Vardas 1961 Clo from 5 to 7
an account of an hour and a half in the life of a normally carefree young
woman who is gravely awaiting a medical diagnosisis one of them, but it
dispenses with the single-camera-take concept that Hitchcock cleverly faked(and that Sokurov would heroically maintain); it is as jazzily photographed and
busily edited as any more conventional narrative film. Rather, Varda seizes the
kind of immediacy and tension associated, at the start of the sixties, with the
cinema verit documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of
fiction. Unlike traditional story films, which skip everywhere in both time and
space, Varda gives us a gauntlet: every second piling up, every step traced out.
And she picked the best possible site for this gauntlet walk: the Left Bank of
Paris is preserved for us in all its early sixties vibrancy and diversity. Indeed,
Varda once described the film as the portrait of a woman painted onto a
documentary about Paris.
It is a stunningly scrupulous, exact film, in space as well as in timeso much so
that a viewer can draw a precise map of Clos path and consider touristically re-
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creating her journey, down to the last second, in the Left Bank as it exists today.
(Vardas only cheat, in fact, is to have titled it Clo from 5 to 7, rather than from
5:00 to 6:30.) But if the film were only a virtuosic formal exercise, or a cleverly
choreographed stroll through a city, it would probably not have endured as the
remarkable, affecting testament that it is. At least since her shortLopra Mouffe
(1958), Varda has devoted a large part of her art to conveying not just what the
physical world looks and sounds like but how it feels, how we process it
internally in our mind, body, and heart. That internal feeling then informs her
presentation of the material world, subtly shaping it into something more than
reala very modern style of expressionism. And sinceLopra Mouffeis a
mosaic of Parisian impressions filtered through the perception of a pregnant
woman, Varda is declaring, early in her career, that gender matters in art and
cinema, that men and women are likely to see and feel the same things very
differentlya theme that follows through to her later filmsVagabond
(1985)and The Gleaners and I (2000), as well as to her installation Some Widows of
Noirmoutier(2006).
It is easy to hail Varda as a pioneer of feminist cinemaa label she resists
but Clo from 5 to 7was, way before its time, already a complex postfeminist
portrait of a woman. Clo is, after all, no idealized archetype. As a central movie
character, she is an unlikely, surprising choice. Clo loves and suffersand it is
hard not to identify with her agonized wait for the medical word that willdecide her futurebut shes also petulant, frivolous, vain, scatty. Varda
deliberately gave her a superficial vocation as a pop singer, with a good deal of
privilege (her older, presumably well-off lover wafts in and out without making
any demands), and what, on any normal day, would count as a fairly whimsical
set of errands and tasks (shopping, rehearsal, visits to friends). Here, as later in
Le bonheur (1964) and Vagabond,Varda avoids easy sentimentality and
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deliberately blocks the path to immediately sympathizing with her heroine.
Corinne Marchand, superb in the role of Clo, at the time evoked the gamine
Jean Seberg of Jean-Luc GodardsBreathlessand anticipated the pop
phenomenon of they-y girl singers in France. But she may seem even more
peculiarly modern to a twenty-first-century audience, a truly prophetic
apparition: with her celebrity narcissism, and her taste for tarot readings and
various other superstitions, Clo could well be a Paris Hilton type, plugged into
new-age fads (at one point, logically enough, Madonna was attached to a
proposed remake). Like Federico Fellini at the time, Varda displayed a finely
prescient sense for the rapid mutations in contemporary lifestyles; it is no
surprise that she would go on to be one of the best documenters of the
counterculture that kicked into gear by the late sixtiesand that, thirty years
later, would reassert itself in the social practices of scavenging so lovingly
recorded in The Gleaners and I.
Because of its real-time structure, Clo from 5 to 7 transforms what, in almost
any other filmic context, would be mundane, or at least unspectacular, into
drama. And, in doing so, it transforms Clo herself from a distracted, self-
obsessed entertainer into someone whose fate we fix on and care about. Her
journey may be simple and straightforward on the geographic levelinto cabs,
through parks, stopping off at cafs and studiosbut on the emotional level it
gets deeper as it goes, accumulating reminders of mortality (such as the Africanmasks she spies in a shopwindow) and stumbling upon unexpected epiphanies.
In this way, the film traces an arc from the brittle, worldly wisdom offered by
Clos assistant, Angle (Dominique Davray), to the soulful romanticism
embodied by Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), a soldier on leave. The quiet energy
that passes between Clo and Antoine on a streetcar near the end of the story
could well be Vardas re-creation of the classic moment of love reborn between
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a husband and wife, traveling on a tramcar, in F. W. Murnaus masterpiece
Sunrise(1927)a reminder of a film loved by the French critics of the fifties,
those same cinephiles who would become the new wave.
Vardas career has often been yoked to the part of the new wave centered on the
directors associated withCahiers du cinmamagazine. Her first feature,La Pointe
Courte(1954), is widely regarded as the first film of that movement, predating
by five years the splash made by Franois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and others.
It is clear what her films share with those Right Bank, more mainstream new
wavers: a breathtaking ability to swing in a moment from light to dark, comic to
dramatic moods, and a taste for the handheld camera, capturing on-the-run
scenes shot spontaneously in the streets of Paris. But Vardas truer kinship was
with the loose Left Bank group comprising herself, husband Jacques Demy,
Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker, among others. Signs of the more radical Left
Bank sensibility are everywhere in Clo from 5 to 7, as in the radio-fed references
to the conflict then raging in Algeria (which made Roger Tailleur, the films
champion atPositifmagazine, fear in the darkness the probable presence of the
censor). More profoundly telling is the cubist-style, multiperspectival approach
characteristic of the Left Bank filmmakersthe sense that it is not one persons
tale but a story that belongs to everyone who passes in and out of its frame.
While respecting the strict time-space continuum of her premise, Varda in fact
never ceases refracting her attention, racking focus on the lives, feelings, andperspectives of all others who cross Clos path; hence the torch passes, often
without a cut, to Angle from 5:18 to 5:25 or Antoine from 6:12 to 6:15.
Time is as much a theme in Clo from 5 to 7 as a narrative or formal structure.
The entire drama (and comedy) of the piece is based on the productive
discrepancy between two very different sorts of timethe real clock time,
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passing second by second, with its end point of the news Clo will receive from
her doctor, and what Pascal Bonitzer once called the passionate time known
best from suspense thrillers but common to all fiction film, the experience of
time that contracts or expands according to how we feel it. Apprehension,
boredom, desirethe film is a succession of these emotional states that, taken
together, pose a countertime, a time of the heart. And this heart time swells in
the course of the film, ultimately transcending the mundanenessand the
menaceof everyday entropy. It is a dialecticthe finite limits of the natural
and biological world versus the infinity of the emotions and the imagination
that Varda would return to again and again, in such films as The Creatures
(1966) andKung-Fu Master (1987) and in the installation piece Zgougous Tomb
(2006), which takes us from the grave of the filmmakers beloved cat to a
literally cosmic view of the wider world and stars.
The most wonderful thing about Clo from 5 to 7is its air of freedom, evoked,
paradoxically, within the very severe constraints of its real-time format, which
must have posed a thousand challenges during shooting and postproduction.
The film is superbly playful, poking occasional holes in its own carefully built
illusion of cascading momentssuch as when an early shot of Clo descending
stairs is repeated, in an editing loop, three times (an evident reference to
DuchampsNude Descending a Staircase), or when she disappears behind a
paravent to reappear instantly in a new outfit. Rich color gives way to black andwhite after the credits, one of many reminders of the artifice of cinema. The
potentially least attractive aspect of Clos character, her propensity to act out
at the drop of a hat, provides the film with its unique, modern register: this is,
in a humorous, almost camp way, a histrionic film, lightly exaggerating itself at
every turnas, for instance, in the impossible proliferation of mirrors and
reflective surfaces wherever Clo finds herself, indoors or outdoors, and in the
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delightful silent-film-within-the-film pastiche featuring Godard, Anna Karina,
and Jean-Claude Brialy (the trio had just worked together onA Woman Is a
Woman). Clo from 5 to 7 is also, in its sly way, a musical (shades, of course, of
Demys work)and no scene is more lyrical than the one in which Vardas
careful mise-en-scne transforms Clos clowning around and casual run-
through of Sans toi (Without You) with Bob (Michel Legrand, the films
composer) and Plumitif (Serge Korber) into a full-out musical number, only to
snap instantly back, at the end of the song, into the realism of the everyday.
Coming in the midst of the new wave, Clo from 5 to 7 seemed to embody the
prime obsession of all the young cinema movements of the sixties: to evoke the
eternal present,flashing by in a sustained intensity. Like Godard or Jerzy
Skolimowski or Glauber Rocha in that heady period, Varda eschews flashbacks
and plunges us into the breathless present-tense unfolding of these precious
ninety minutes in Clos life. Yet, via the dialectic of real time and passionate
time, the mundane and the hyperreal, Varda also creates a complex double
focus, leaping (as Tailleur observed) from the here and now to eternity, to a
cosmic vision. In the final moments of Clo from 5 to 7,Clo, even if her fate is
not entirely decided or assured, is nonetheless released: into serenity, into love,
and into a future that now seems possible beyond the second-to-second prison
of clock-driven daily life. It is the kind of conceptual and emotional leap Varda
would often make in her future work, and is still making: from the inscrutableproblems of a marriage to the overarching, impossibly vibrant presence of the
natural world of flowers and streams inLe bonheur; or in the very title of the
autobiographical 2006 exhibition about her regular trips to Noirmoutier,Lle et
elle,The Island and Her, a pun also evoking him and her. Gender roles may
still be starkly dividing up the world that she shows usa showbiz job for a
woman and a military job for a man in Clo from 5 to 7,the domestic indoors for
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women and the great outdoors for men in her multiscreen installation pieces
but the power and energy of the imagination can surge forth to abolish these
divisions, and transcend the merely earthly in the fusion offered by love.
Adrian Martin is the film critic for the Melbourne Age; the author of Ral Ruiz:
Magnificent -Obsessions, The Mad Max Movies, Once Upon a Time in America,
and Phantasms; and coeditor of Movie Mutationsand the film magazine Rouge(www.rouge.com.au).