Cléo de 5 à 7 (review)

The fiftieth anniversary of the nouvelle vague prompts reflection on the extraordinary longevity and productivity of most of its directors. While Agnès Varda is not strictly speaking a nouvelle vague film-maker, belonging rather with Jacques Demy, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais to what Richard Roud dubbed the 'Left Bank group', her work is nevertheless closely associated with what remains one of the two crestline moments, along with the 1930s classic cinema of such as Carné and Renoir, in French cinematic history. Ungar's attractive monograph coincides with the release of Varda's most recent work, the autofictional documentary Les Plages d'Agnès, and provides a thorough and illuminating analysis of the second feature film (the first is the often neglected La Pointe-Courte) by the most influential and best-known of French woman directors. If Varda was something of an outsider in the early 1960s, this may have had less to do with her gender than with her photographic training and lack of 'significant experience as a filmgoer' (p. 13), in sharp contrast to the Cinémathèque junkies Godard and Truffaut. Ungar gives a well-documented account of Varda's early life and activity before moving on to a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Cléo, in which considerations of gender (the singer Cléo's role as object of male gaze and auditory attention), narrative temporality —the film is close to being shot in real time —and politics (the Algerian war to which Cléo seems all but oblivious until her meeting with the conscript Antoine near the end) are given due and erudite weight. Ungar's reading is especially provocative in his approach to Antoine, seen not as the romantic guardian angel many of us would like him to be but as a gentle sibling figure despite his dubious gender assumptions, and is noteworthy too for the attention it pays to the —often ethnic —uncanny so pervasive in the film and to its soundtrack, though I am unconvinced that Cléo's song 'Sans toi' is 'in the tradition of the realist female singer symbolized in the film by Édith Piaf' (p. 93) rather than in that of cloying Gallic balladry. Critical approaches to the film are comprehensively surveyed, and the book is well presented, though François Poulenc mysteriously becomes 'Georges'. There is alas —as with other works in the BFI Film Classics series —no index.