Cléo from 5 to 7

The story

A tarot reading opens the film, in its only passage of colour: the cards frighten Cléo Victoire, a successful pop singer, who is waiting on the result of a biopsy. For the next hour and a half she moves through Paris — a café, a hat shop, a taxi, her own apartment — trailed by her superstition and her fear.

At home she rehearses with her songwriters, one of them played by the composer Michel Legrand, and the session cracks open on a song, “Sans toi,” that she suddenly performs straight to camera. She leaves, sits with her friend Dorothée, drifts through Montparnasse, and comes to rest in the Parc Montsouris, where she meets Antoine, a young soldier on leave from the Algerian War. He walks her to the hospital. The doctor confirms the illness but tells her treatment will begin, and she is, unexpectedly, calm.

From looked-at to looking

The film's real subject is the change named in that arc. Cléo begins as an object — watched by strangers, by mirrors, by her entourage, and by the camera — and vain and passive because of it. As the afternoon wears on she starts to look back: at other faces, at the city, at the war in the newspapers, at her own mortality. Critics have long read it as one of the founding films of the female gaze, a woman shown becoming a seeing subject in real time.

Varda, a photographer before she was a filmmaker, builds the change out of looking itself — point-of-view shots, tracking shots that follow Cléo rather than display her, and documentary faces caught on the real streets of Paris.

A Left Bank film

Cléo from 5 to 7 is the signature film of the New Wave's Left Bank wing — the group around Varda, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker, older and more essayistic than the Cahiers du cinéma directors. Michel Legrand wrote the score and appears on screen, Jean Rabier shot it, and Georges de Beauregard and Carlo Ponti produced it.

Midway through, Cléo and Dorothée watch a silent comic short made for the film, “Les fiancés du pont MacDonald,” cast with Varda's New Wave friends — Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina among them, alongside Eddie Constantine, Sami Frey, and Jean-Claude Brialy. It is the movement waving at itself inside one of its own films.

What is still there

The route across Paris, address by address

Because the film runs close to real time, its geography is not decorative — it is the clock. Cléo crosses Paris from the Right Bank to the Left over ninety minutes, and every stop is a real address you can still walk to. This is the sequence, with what stands there now.

She breaks down in a café that was then called Ça va, ça vient, at 24 rue des Bourdonnais in the 1st. The café is gone and the building is anonymous now. From there to the hat shop at 128 rue de Rivoli, which is no longer a milliner but is still selling clothes.

Her own flat is 3 rue Huyghens in the 14th, and its exterior is unchanged — you can stand in front of the door she comes out of. The pharmacy she visits on the boulevard du Montparnasse has shifted round onto the corner.

Then Le Dôme on the boulevard du Montparnasse, the café Hemingway and the Montparnasse painters had used a generation earlier. It has changed a great deal since 1962 but is still recognisably itself, and it is the point where the film's Paris and the writers' Paris turn out to be the same room.

The long central sequence is in Parc Montsouris in the 14th — a park laid out in a worked-out quarry, which is a quietly apt setting for a woman spending an afternoon waiting to learn whether she is ill. The Palais du Bardo, glimpsed on the way in, burned down in the 1990s; the waterfall where she meets the soldier Antoine is still there.

The film ends at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in the 13th, which the BFI records as unchanged. It is a working hospital rather than a location to wander into, but the façades Varda shot are the façades that stand.

1962–

Reception and afterlife

The film competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1962 and established Varda internationally at thirty-four — the first fully achieved feature by the director who would become the leading woman of French cinema.

It has never left the canon. Restored and distributed by the Criterion Collection, it is now among the most-taught films of the movement, a fixture of courses on the New Wave and on the gaze. It is the Left Bank's answer to Breathless: a Paris film about looking, made by the movement's founding woman.