cleo from 5 to 7 (w&d agnès varda)

This film, a little like the Haneke film I recently watched in London, is perhaps another of my Ur-texts. (As might be Performance, so this is a year for the father/mother texts). I would guess I had only seen Cleo once before, but the simplicity and urgency of the filmmaking left its mark. To tell the story of a woman, a character, in 90 minutes, which are more or less 90 minutes of her life, a way of sticking to the unities of time, place and action, is to create a lightning flash of a film, to stop and capture time. Varda’s Cleo has no great profound storyline to pursue. She’s scared she’s got a fatal illness, but we the audience are never sure whether this might be real or part of the drama she creates, part of her beauty and appeal. Aside from this she drifts around Paris, meeting friends and lovers. It’s inconsequential, but that’s part of its charm. Where film narratives seem so dependent on dramatic tropes, Varda resists, letting the star and the camera and the city guide us through the timeline. Indeed, in many ways the film, with the brilliant cinematography of Paul Bonis, Alain Levent and Jean Rabier, is a love letter to Paris, a Paris which still feels like it might be the city of the flaneur, a set on which its inhabitants play out their roles, blessed to be framed against the backdrop the designer has given them.