Fittipaldi Pereira - Cleo by Varda

CLEO BY VARDA: SEEING WHAT IT (ONE) IS
Eliane Fittipaldi Pereira
University of São Paulo, Brazil
So, how many people know how to observe?
And of these, how many observe themselves?
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Cleo1, the character who lends her name to the feature-length movie Cléo de 5 à 7 written
and directed by Agnès Varda (1962) is a fictitious woman — and no less of a woman for
being fictitious) — who “unlearns” a way of existing that no longer serves her and looks
for a more authentic and independent one, with everything it entails. In her rhetorically
(dis)articulated body of words, axiological themes are constructed and deconstructed as
she formulates an ontological thinking and adopts a psychological behavior that call into
question the social and cultural values of her time — and eventually those of present days.
Cleo’s (un)apprenticeship fundamentally consists of looking at people and things
and really seeing them; of seeing herself and refusing what is imposed on her by the
Other, not to her best interest. She starts her self-development path from a rigid
monolithic identity and a narcissistic perspective, suffers a deep shock that makes her
estrange herself and the world she lives in, and ends up yielding to the unexpected.
Crossing a labyrinth of literal and metaphoric mirrors that she speculates and by which is
speculated, falling into the abyss formed by her multiplied image displayed on them ad
infinitum, Cléo offers her experience to our own vision: she herself becomes the mirror of
a problematic concept of femininity refracted in many features.
The movie title presents her as the plot’s diegetic axis and links her to her time with
a tragical irony — an irony arising from the paradoxical use of the expression “from 5 to
7”, which usually refers to the period when clandestine lovers meet for their sexual
practices. In actual fact, Cleo’s one-hour-and-a-half fictitious existence turns around her
anxious expectation of a cancer diagnosis, which keeps the corresponding one-and-ahalf hour of screen projection from being categorized as a romantic movie. This time
1
Interpreted by Corinne Marchand.
interval accurately registers intense transforming encounters between the heroine and
everything she faces, herself included. From the starting point of pain, she forsakes her
forged self-representation, disposes of her prototypical masks made of external beauty
patterns and gradually opens herself to life and its imponderable contingencies.
Cleo from 5 to 7 evinces the topic of “being and time”. It places Cleo’s body, her
feminine being par excellence at the specific time of the Algerian war — and in the specific
city of Paris. In this film, woman and city are so metaphorically associated that one seems
to echo the other in imitative harmony. Both match to such an extent that talking about
one is talking about the other; both meet with a friction that refines the protagonist and
re-signifies the city in a very particular way. Varda achieves this effect by mixing the
referential function (the documentary approach), the emotive function (Cléo’s pathetic
speech), and the poetic function of narrative (symbols and metaphors). She also
combines the sequential causality of the traditional narrative (movement images) with
formal experimentation (time images), a technique which challenges and revitalizes the
elements of classic cinema.
Cleo is a pop singer on her way to becoming famous, and her main value has always
been her beauty, to which she wholly identifies. By acknowledging her condition of “beingtoward-death” and the consequent pain of existing, she faces an ethical questioning
process of phenomenological, psychological and existential consequences: what to do of
life, considering that death is a given premise? What can one apprehend from what one
sees? Does the image one projects onto the world coincide with the person one believes
she is? Or does it coincide with what one is but ignores? Is vision a dependable source
of knowledge? Or does it distort our perception of the world and ourselves? Is the hell
inside us perceptible to others?
Accustomed to being admired, Cléo gradually (and unwillingly) assumes a position
from where she perceives more than herself. And this focus displacement is ingeniously
performed by camera shifts that show her from the outside (when she enjoys being looked
at), adhere to her point of view by accompanying her side by side (thus producing an
effect correspondent to free indirect speech in literature), stick to her neck making the
spectator cling to her body and follow her around by the means of a travelling technique
that metaphorizes her flânerie and plunges her, as well as her thoughts and feelings, in
the scene (corresponding to the conscience flow in written narrative). These camera shifts
turn the linearity of her path into rhizomatic wandering, whereas the sharp mark-up of
time gives way to duration, showing that her apparently ordered life is in fact chaotic and
escapes control.
Varda (the real woman behind the filming camera) constructs in Cleo’s body, voice
and gestures, a femininity desired by men and adopted by women. At the same time, she
deconstructs it from a skillfully underlying feminist standpoint (initially ironical and then
subtly empathic) by associating woman’s beauty with the consciousness of death; by
making a movie that is surprisingly light and pleasurable in spite of its deep content.
Walking freely in a city haunted by the colonial war, meeting a she-friend who revels
in her own body, seeing the others’ distresses and encountering her warrior Anthony (a
soldier on the eve of returning to the war), Cléopâtre Victoire (Cléo’s full artistic name, a
clear allusion to the legendary Egyptian Queen as well as to the famous dancer Cléo de
Mérode) finds a more flexible and human position. No more an idol to be adored,
burdened with a (treatable) cancer, she becomes able to exchange her feelings and
promote an ontological opening that is symbolized by her wide open eyes looking at her
mate and by the couple taking a paratactic walk on the uncertain road ahead, looking at
us:
Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961), Agnès Varda © ciné-tamaris
This is not a “happy ending”. This phrase has no place in Modernity. It is just a result
of Cleo’s (un)apprenticeship — her reconciliation with her destiny, even if it includes
scaring prospects. It is about taking on whatever happens, understanding the possibility
of death as intrinsic to being and affirming immediate life despite that — adding the
memento vivere to the memento mori (remembering that one is mortal but has a life to
live):
wanting nothing to be different, not forward, not backwards, not in
all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, even less conceal it ... but
love it.2
The rupture of the fourth wall suggests that the couple will keep walking and seeing
forward beyond the cinematic frame. Until death arrives (and it will certainly arrive one
day or another), the only value to pursue is present life in its intensity.
Cléo’s look extends to the extra-field and her femininity keeps developing itself as
an open process, in the same way the possibility of “becoming woman” in a finite
existence is always open.
2
From NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. Ecce homo. Our translation.