Cleo from 5 to 7, acclaimed in France as "the most beautiful film ever made about Paris," is a curiously, spuriously brilliant attempt to contemporize the legend of Death and the Maiden.
Directed by Agnés Varda, a 34-year-old photographer whose first film (La Pointe Courte) established her as "the Founding Mother of the new French cinema," Cleo tells the story of 90 moribund minutes in the life of a featherbrained Parisian canary (Corinne Marchand) who has just begun to peck the plum of show-business success. As the story starts, the singer is nerving herself to ask a doctor whether or not she has a cancer. Pale with dread, she visits a fortuneteller first and asks the old crone what is in the cards for her. Death is in the cards for her, and the fortuneteller cannot quite conceal the fatal fact.
For the next 87 minutes, without waiting for the doctor to confirm or deny the prediction, the poor little canary flutters in terror through the streets of Paris, pursued by the big black cat of Death. She flutters past a market, where carcasses of cattle hang from brutal hooks and the butchers inspect her expertly, as though she were a carcass too. She flutters to her manager (Dominique Davray), a hard-faced businesswoman who comforts her meticulously but unemotionally, as though smoothing a 500-franc note. She flies back to her gilded cage in time to preen and twitter for the man who keeps her for the same reasons he keeps a second car: convenience and ostentation. Her songwriters arrive, and the canary mechanically warbles a few love songs she has sung a hundred times before without a pulse of feeling; but suddenly now they crush her heart and she flies into the street again. Death is everywhere: in the broadcasts from Algeria, in the movie she drops in on, in the jaws of the street-corner showman who cheerily passes the hat as he swallows frogs alive.
So far so good. The cinematography (Jean Rabier) is imaginative, if sometimes cute. The quality of street life in Paris is fetchingly evoked. And the fact of death in the midst of life is realized with horrible power in the image of the filthy cancer hidden in the glowing girl. But the film intends to show more than this. It intends to show a crise de I'ãme, "a profound transformation of the being." It doesn't. For one thing, Actress Marchand's face is no more capable of transformation than a kewpie doll's. For another, Director Varda suddenly twists the heroine's harm into a happy ending which sentimentally suggests that every shroud has a silver lining.
Tales of Paris. Some things a girl just can't admit. Not in Paris. Not when she's 18, and the best years of her life are almost over. So Sophie (Catherine Deneuve) gulps and announces with a superior smirk: "Of course I have a lover. He's terribly passionate. He makes me undress in the car, right in the middle of town, with the chauffeur sitting up front." The other girls grin. "Really? And where do you meet?" "Oh," says Sophie grandly, "he's taken a flat for us." The enemy closes in. "Ha! You expect us to believe that? What's the address?" Sophie is superb. "Number Six, Place Violet," she announces with a shrug.