Paris. Singer Florence "Cleo" waits from 5:00 pm until 6:30 pm for her medical results on whether or not she has cancer. A tarot card reader overturns a card featuring death. Cleo and her maid Angele meet at a diner, go shopping and then take a cab back to Cleo's apartment. At home, Cleo fleetingly meets her lover and starts her singing lessons with a piano player, but then leaves after she has to sing the word "despair". Cleo meets nude model in a sculpture class, Dorothee, and they drive off to a cinema. Cleo goes to a park alone and meets a soldier, Antoine, staring a chat with him. They both go to the hospital, but the doctor isn't there. Cleo and Antoine wait at a bench, the doctor shows up in a car, informs her she has a beign tumor and needs two months of chemotherapy, and then drives off.
Included in Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies, a great example of a movie covering an event in real time, "Cleo from 5 to 7" is a simple, unassuming little film about the title heroine waiting for an hour and a half for the results of her medical test, and yet the director and screenwriter Agnes Warda is able to make it interesting from start to finish, even though its focus is mostly on Cleo's conventional encounters and episodes in the city. It is a film that demands endless patience, but it still unravels, surprisingly, much more intriguing and entertaining than one would expect. As if following Hitchcock's statement about how "There is no suspense in the shot, just in the anticipation of it", this whole film is based on casual, everyday anecdotes of the main heroine Cléo, that are all emotionally charged because they are pointing out and anticipating the results at the end. The movie owns such a success mostly to the sophisticated, quiet, subtle, and considerate direction as well as a restrained, authentic and unbelievably convincing performances by the actors, whose characters seem like real people and their small, "trivial" problems close and easily recognisable.
Even though it was filmed in black and white, the opening scenes of a bird's-eye view of tarot cards on the table are filmed in color, whereas the authenticity can be sensed in several little details (during the cab drive, the radio news informs about riots during the Algerian War as well as Edith Piaf's recovery from the surgery, a sly foreshadowing of the fate of Cleo, who is also a singer fearing she has an illness). Little details somehow become precious in this film: while riding in a cab with the radio turned on, Cleo suddenly says: "Stop it!" The cab stops, yet Cleo explains: "I meant stop the music!", since her singing is heard on the radio. Throughout these episodes as she wanders around, the movie slyly throws symbolism as it contemplates about art, love, a sense of purpose, birth and death, as Cleo encounters other artists (a sculpture model; a great little silent comedy film featuring a cameo from Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina), small kittens are inside her apartment, she is unhappy with her "formal" and unpassionate lover, or spots two doctors carrying a premature-born baby in an incubator. Finally, Cleo wants to escape it all and flees to park Montsouris, where she meets a soldier who has great observations about love: "I was often in love, but never as deeply as I wanted. Girls just like to be loved. They're afraid to give themselves, to lose something. They love by halves. So I stop halfway too." Some moments are indeed too conventional and arbitrary, but unlike Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman", "Cleo" shows a real-time event that doesn't become overstretched and has an ideal running time, articulating its themes in a much more compact manner. Each of the twelve chapters shows clarity and intrigues with ease ("Chapter I: Cleo from 5:05 to 5:08"), all aligning into a purposeful story that makes the viewers think about the fragilty and the search for meaning in life, as well as the fear of loss.
Grade:+++
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