Nouvelles Femmes: Cléo from 5 to 7
September 30, 2026
This afternoon, beautiful pop singer Cléo (Corinne Marchand) will find out the results of her cancer biopsy, and this raw fact changes her life. She’s used to everyone looking adoringly at her, defining her as a princess. Today, as Varda says, “She changes to a black dress, like singer Edith Piaf, and goes out; now she looks at the world.”
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Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Agnes Varda, an accomplished photojournalist, schooled her male New Wave contemporaries on the artistic power of on-location filming in natural light. Here, in Cléo’s summertime Paris, Varda privileges us with the view from inside a woman’s subjectivity. “Cléo (Corinne Marchand) is the cliché woman: tall, beautiful, blonde, voluptuous. I show her at the moment she doesn’t want to be this cliché, doesn’t want to be looked at, wants to do the looking herself, no longer the object, but the subject who looks.” Young film student Martin Scorsese realized that “Varda crystallized a profound instant of Cléo’s personal transformation and intellectual growth.” The catalyst for her growth is raw fear: she’s waiting two hours for her cancer biopsy results. The lover and entourage who reflect her image as a pop singer are no help, she has to get beyond herself, drop her masks outdoors in the streets with strangers, the human panorama. She encounters a rare female taxi driver, who says, “Tough job for a woman, dangerous, but I like it.” It’s possible for Cléo to see herself and the world in new ways. The time of her medical verdict is near. Amidst the trees of Paris she meets a soldier (Antoine Boursellier) also afraid of death. Varda feels they “share a gentle complicity, something you can feel in exceptional circumstances.” At one point on her Paris journey, Cleo watches a humorous short film starring Varda’s friends Jean-Luc Godard and his wife Anna Karina. Godard habitually wore dark glasses, but Varda thought he had "beautiful eyes,” and the film shows his life perspective changing when he lets in more light.
- Director: Agnès Varda
- Principal Cast: Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dominique Davray
- Country: France, Italy
- Year: 1962
- Running Time: 90 min.
- Producer: Georges de Beauregard, Carlo Ponti
- Screenplay: Agnès Varda
- Language: French
- Has Subtitles: Yes
- US Distributor: Janus Films