cléo from 5 to 7_ passionate time - from the current - the criterion collection

8/13/2019 Clo from 5 to 7_ Passionate Time - From the Current - The Criterion Collection

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29/12/13 Clo from 5 to 7: Passionate Time - From the Current - The Criterion Collection

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Clo from 5 to 7:Passionate Time

By Adrian Martin

There have been many films, from Alfred Hitchcocks Rope(1948) to Alexander

SokurovsRussian Ark (2002), devoted to the challenge of capturing or

reconstituting the experience of real time. Agns Vardas 1961 Clo from 5 to 7

an account of an hour and a half in the life of a normally carefree young

woman who is gravely awaiting a medical diagnosisis one of them, but it

dispenses with the single-camera-take concept that Hitchcock cleverly faked(and that Sokurov would heroically maintain); it is as jazzily photographed and

busily edited as any more conventional narrative film. Rather, Varda seizes the

kind of immediacy and tension associated, at the start of the sixties, with the

cinema verit documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of

fiction. Unlike traditional story films, which skip everywhere in both time and

space, Varda gives us a gauntlet: every second piling up, every step traced out.

And she picked the best possible site for this gauntlet walk: the Left Bank of

Paris is preserved for us in all its early sixties vibrancy and diversity. Indeed,

Varda once described the film as the portrait of a woman painted onto a

documentary about Paris.

It is a stunningly scrupulous, exact film, in space as well as in timeso much so

that a viewer can draw a precise map of Clos path and consider touristically re-


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creating her journey, down to the last second, in the Left Bank as it exists today.

(Vardas only cheat, in fact, is to have titled it Clo from 5 to 7, rather than from

5:00 to 6:30.) But if the film were only a virtuosic formal exercise, or a cleverly

choreographed stroll through a city, it would probably not have endured as the

remarkable, affecting testament that it is. At least since her shortLopra Mouffe

(1958), Varda has devoted a large part of her art to conveying not just what the

physical world looks and sounds like but how it feels, how we process it

internally in our mind, body, and heart. That internal feeling then informs her

presentation of the material world, subtly shaping it into something more than

reala very modern style of expressionism. And sinceLopra Mouffeis a

mosaic of Parisian impressions filtered through the perception of a pregnant

woman, Varda is declaring, early in her career, that gender matters in art and

cinema, that men and women are likely to see and feel the same things very

differentlya theme that follows through to her later filmsVagabond

(1985)and The Gleaners and I (2000), as well as to her installation Some Widows of

Noirmoutier(2006).

It is easy to hail Varda as a pioneer of feminist cinemaa label she resists

but Clo from 5 to 7was, way before its time, already a complex postfeminist

portrait of a woman. Clo is, after all, no idealized archetype. As a central movie

character, she is an unlikely, surprising choice. Clo loves and suffersand it is

hard not to identify with her agonized wait for the medical word that willdecide her futurebut shes also petulant, frivolous, vain, scatty. Varda

deliberately gave her a superficial vocation as a pop singer, with a good deal of

privilege (her older, presumably well-off lover wafts in and out without making

any demands), and what, on any normal day, would count as a fairly whimsical

set of errands and tasks (shopping, rehearsal, visits to friends). Here, as later in

Le bonheur (1964) and Vagabond,Varda avoids easy sentimentality and


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deliberately blocks the path to immediately sympathizing with her heroine.

Corinne Marchand, superb in the role of Clo, at the time evoked the gamine

Jean Seberg of Jean-Luc GodardsBreathlessand anticipated the pop

phenomenon of they-y girl singers in France. But she may seem even more

peculiarly modern to a twenty-first-century audience, a truly prophetic

apparition: with her celebrity narcissism, and her taste for tarot readings and

various other superstitions, Clo could well be a Paris Hilton type, plugged into

new-age fads (at one point, logically enough, Madonna was attached to a

proposed remake). Like Federico Fellini at the time, Varda displayed a finely

prescient sense for the rapid mutations in contemporary lifestyles; it is no

surprise that she would go on to be one of the best documenters of the

counterculture that kicked into gear by the late sixtiesand that, thirty years

later, would reassert itself in the social practices of scavenging so lovingly

recorded in The Gleaners and I.

Because of its real-time structure, Clo from 5 to 7 transforms what, in almost

any other filmic context, would be mundane, or at least unspectacular, into

drama. And, in doing so, it transforms Clo herself from a distracted, self-

obsessed entertainer into someone whose fate we fix on and care about. Her

journey may be simple and straightforward on the geographic levelinto cabs,

through parks, stopping off at cafs and studiosbut on the emotional level it

gets deeper as it goes, accumulating reminders of mortality (such as the Africanmasks she spies in a shopwindow) and stumbling upon unexpected epiphanies.

In this way, the film traces an arc from the brittle, worldly wisdom offered by

Clos assistant, Angle (Dominique Davray), to the soulful romanticism

embodied by Antoine (Antoine Bourseiller), a soldier on leave. The quiet energy

that passes between Clo and Antoine on a streetcar near the end of the story

could well be Vardas re-creation of the classic moment of love reborn between


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a husband and wife, traveling on a tramcar, in F. W. Murnaus masterpiece

Sunrise(1927)a reminder of a film loved by the French critics of the fifties,

those same cinephiles who would become the new wave.

Vardas career has often been yoked to the part of the new wave centered on the

directors associated withCahiers du cinmamagazine. Her first feature,La Pointe

Courte(1954), is widely regarded as the first film of that movement, predating

by five years the splash made by Franois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and others.

It is clear what her films share with those Right Bank, more mainstream new

wavers: a breathtaking ability to swing in a moment from light to dark, comic to

dramatic moods, and a taste for the handheld camera, capturing on-the-run

scenes shot spontaneously in the streets of Paris. But Vardas truer kinship was

with the loose Left Bank group comprising herself, husband Jacques Demy,

Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker, among others. Signs of the more radical Left

Bank sensibility are everywhere in Clo from 5 to 7, as in the radio-fed references

to the conflict then raging in Algeria (which made Roger Tailleur, the films

champion atPositifmagazine, fear in the darkness the probable presence of the

censor). More profoundly telling is the cubist-style, multiperspectival approach

characteristic of the Left Bank filmmakersthe sense that it is not one persons

tale but a story that belongs to everyone who passes in and out of its frame.

While respecting the strict time-space continuum of her premise, Varda in fact

never ceases refracting her attention, racking focus on the lives, feelings, andperspectives of all others who cross Clos path; hence the torch passes, often

without a cut, to Angle from 5:18 to 5:25 or Antoine from 6:12 to 6:15.

Time is as much a theme in Clo from 5 to 7 as a narrative or formal structure.

The entire drama (and comedy) of the piece is based on the productive

discrepancy between two very different sorts of timethe real clock time,


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passing second by second, with its end point of the news Clo will receive from

her doctor, and what Pascal Bonitzer once called the passionate time known

best from suspense thrillers but common to all fiction film, the experience of

time that contracts or expands according to how we feel it. Apprehension,

boredom, desirethe film is a succession of these emotional states that, taken

together, pose a countertime, a time of the heart. And this heart time swells in

the course of the film, ultimately transcending the mundanenessand the

menaceof everyday entropy. It is a dialecticthe finite limits of the natural

and biological world versus the infinity of the emotions and the imagination

that Varda would return to again and again, in such films as The Creatures

(1966) andKung-Fu Master (1987) and in the installation piece Zgougous Tomb

(2006), which takes us from the grave of the filmmakers beloved cat to a

literally cosmic view of the wider world and stars.

The most wonderful thing about Clo from 5 to 7is its air of freedom, evoked,

paradoxically, within the very severe constraints of its real-time format, which

must have posed a thousand challenges during shooting and postproduction.

The film is superbly playful, poking occasional holes in its own carefully built

illusion of cascading momentssuch as when an early shot of Clo descending

stairs is repeated, in an editing loop, three times (an evident reference to

DuchampsNude Descending a Staircase), or when she disappears behind a

paravent to reappear instantly in a new outfit. Rich color gives way to black andwhite after the credits, one of many reminders of the artifice of cinema. The

potentially least attractive aspect of Clos character, her propensity to act out

at the drop of a hat, provides the film with its unique, modern register: this is,

in a humorous, almost camp way, a histrionic film, lightly exaggerating itself at

every turnas, for instance, in the impossible proliferation of mirrors and

reflective surfaces wherever Clo finds herself, indoors or outdoors, and in the


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delightful silent-film-within-the-film pastiche featuring Godard, Anna Karina,

and Jean-Claude Brialy (the trio had just worked together onA Woman Is a

Woman). Clo from 5 to 7 is also, in its sly way, a musical (shades, of course, of

Demys work)and no scene is more lyrical than the one in which Vardas

careful mise-en-scne transforms Clos clowning around and casual run-

through of Sans toi (Without You) with Bob (Michel Legrand, the films

composer) and Plumitif (Serge Korber) into a full-out musical number, only to

snap instantly back, at the end of the song, into the realism of the everyday.

Coming in the midst of the new wave, Clo from 5 to 7 seemed to embody the

prime obsession of all the young cinema movements of the sixties: to evoke the

eternal present,flashing by in a sustained intensity. Like Godard or Jerzy

Skolimowski or Glauber Rocha in that heady period, Varda eschews flashbacks

and plunges us into the breathless present-tense unfolding of these precious

ninety minutes in Clos life. Yet, via the dialectic of real time and passionate

time, the mundane and the hyperreal, Varda also creates a complex double

focus, leaping (as Tailleur observed) from the here and now to eternity, to a

cosmic vision. In the final moments of Clo from 5 to 7,Clo, even if her fate is

not entirely decided or assured, is nonetheless released: into serenity, into love,

and into a future that now seems possible beyond the second-to-second prison

of clock-driven daily life. It is the kind of conceptual and emotional leap Varda

would often make in her future work, and is still making: from the inscrutableproblems of a marriage to the overarching, impossibly vibrant presence of the

natural world of flowers and streams inLe bonheur; or in the very title of the

autobiographical 2006 exhibition about her regular trips to Noirmoutier,Lle et

elle,The Island and Her, a pun also evoking him and her. Gender roles may

still be starkly dividing up the world that she shows usa showbiz job for a

woman and a military job for a man in Clo from 5 to 7,the domestic indoors for


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women and the great outdoors for men in her multiscreen installation pieces

but the power and energy of the imagination can surge forth to abolish these

divisions, and transcend the merely earthly in the fusion offered by love.

Adrian Martin is the film critic for the Melbourne Age; the author of Ral Ruiz:

Magnificent -Obsessions, The Mad Max Movies, Once Upon a Time in America,

and Phantasms; and coeditor of Movie Mutationsand the film magazine Rouge(www.rouge.com.au).

cléo from 5 to 7_ passionate time - from the current - the criterion collection

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