Summary
A young singer Cléo is anxiously awaiting the results of a medical examination.
When a fortune-teller reveals she has cancer and may die, Cléo’s worries increase.
She tries to find things to do to fill out the next two hours before she knows the results
of her test. She meets a young soldier who is about to set off for military service
in Algeria and who confides in her his fear of death.
Review
Agnès Varda’s second full-length film, and probably her most highly rated work,
is one of the defining films of the French New Wave. Like many of her Nouvelle Vague
contemporaries, Varda combines a direct, almost documentary style of film-making with
an intensely humanist perspective, whilst bringing in wider political concerns of the
day (here, reference to the increasingly fruitless war between France and Algeria).
Corinne Marchand’s mesmerising performance as Cléo captures the anxiety of a self-centred
woman who suddenly realises she may be about to lose everything. Varda being one
of the few female film directors of the New Wave, the film has a distinctively female
perspective, and shows female vulnerability perhaps more convincingly than most other
film directors of this period. With its fluid photography, in expressive black-and-white,
the film has a timeless, poetic quality, which works well with its sense of tragic realism.
The film includes a sequence in which Cléo watches a silent black and white film,
a witty allegory in which New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard appears with Anna Karina.
This is perhaps one indulgence which jars, providing an awkward break in the flow of the
film. In the latter half of the film, Cléo’s supposed cancer is contrasted
with the real malaise of the Algerian war, a daring gesture on the part of Varda (risking
the film being banned by the censors).
© James Travers 2002
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