Cléo from 5 to 7 · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

She keeps checking her face. Shop windows, a compact, the mirrored walls of a hat shop: Cléo can't pass a reflective surface without confirming she's still in it. For the first half of the film Paris is upholstered in glass, and every pane hands her back to herself. Then, in a rehearsal room, she tears off the blonde wig and walks out, and the mirrors stop answering. Paris quits reflecting her and simply goes on existing. Nothing has been solved. She still doesn't know what the biopsy says. But the film has changed what kind of film it is, and that change is the event.

Varda built it on a borrowed device. Real time was suspense technology before Cléo. Hitchcock collapsed screen time onto story time in Rope with near-continuous takes; Robert Wise ran The Set-Up on a strict clock with the hands visible; Zinnemann cut back to timepieces all through High Noon. In each case the clock does one job. It counts down toward an act. Somebody will decide something at the end of it, and the ticking is pressure on that decision. Deleuze called this whole arrangement the movement-image: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and time is just the gap between the problem and the solution. The clock exists to make the action matter.

Varda keeps the clock and removes the action. She chapters the film with timestamps, sets its runtime inside Cléo's ninety minutes, and then arranges things so that nothing Cléo does in those minutes can touch the outcome. The result is already true. It's sitting in a lab we never see, the one thing in the film with no location on the map of Paris she crosses. Deleuze had a name for that kind of elsewhere: the absolute out-of-field, an outside you can't reach by panning. Cléo can buy a hat, quarrel with her songwriter, ride a cab across the city. The verdict does not move.

Take away effective action and something surfaces that action normally hides. Deleuze's term for an image that gives you time directly, rather than as the interval before a resolution, is the chronosign. The word is forbidding and the idea is not. When action can absorb time, you don't feel it passing. When it can't, you feel nothing else. High Noon's clock is suspense. Cléo's is duration.

What fills the emptied minutes is looking. Deleuze's figure for the postwar protagonist is the voyant, the seer: someone who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive and therefore genuinely perceives it. Rossellini got there through rubble. Varda found a route nobody else would have thought of, handing the job to a woman whose profession is being looked at. Cléo is a pop singer, competent at the gaze and dependent on it, and her crisis converts her from the looked-at into the looker. The stretches where the film appears to be doing nothing, the cab crossing the city, the café where the talk has no bearing on the plot, are what Deleuze called temps mort, dead time. They aren't filler. They are where the seeing happens. He also noticed how often modern cinema takes the shape of the balade, the stroll that transforms no situation. Cléo's walk changes nothing external whatsoever. It changes what she can see, which the older cinema had no equipment to film.

Which brings the mirrors back, because Varda is doing something more exact with them than décor. Deleuze's crystal-image is the point where an image and its double, reflection or performance or memory, can't be ranked; you can't say which one is the original. A world sealed inside that exchange is a crystal with no outside, and that is Cléo before the wig. Every surface returns a version of her, and her sense of being alive runs on the return. Varda even reserves the film's only color for the tarot cards at the start, the one set of images that claims to see the future; everything after is black and white, which cannot. Then the crystal cracks. Deleuze cared about that crack specifically, the fissure that is a line of flight out of a sealed totality, and it is hard to think of a cleaner instance anywhere in cinema. One gesture, and the glass stops working. What comes through the gap is a city.

She already had the instrument. In 1955 La Pointe Courte braided a documented fishing village against a scripted couple, and Resnais cut it; four years later he made Hiroshima mon amour, which laid interior monologue over a woman walking a city and treated clock time as psychological time. That is the Left Bank inheritance, and Varda's advance on it is to stop alternating. In Cléo the document and the fiction share a shot in the same minute, real passersby in frame with the actress, handheld, in daylight, using the method Godard had just proven in Breathless. Deleuze's word for an image that shows us a perception being had, with the camera's own looking left audible in the frame, is the dicisign. Varda gets it by the simplest means available. We watch Cléo watch herself, and we are never allowed to forget that a third party is present with a camera.

She's funny about it, too. Mid-film she stops everything and screens a silent burlesque starring Godard and Anna Karina: a little slapstick engine of cause and effect, bodies acting on situations, the movement-image in miniature, running for a few minutes inside a film that has quietly walked out on that regime. The New Wave's presiding theorist clowns in Varda's parenthesis. She was there five years before him and she knew it.

What Cléo established is easy to state and was not obvious in 1962: a film can hold a story's entire duration without borrowing suspense to justify it, a plot can consist of a change in someone's perception with no external event to carry that change, and looking hard at something can be the most cinematic act a person performs. The open question is the one Varda declines to close. Is Cléo cured of vanity, or has she just been handed a subject larger than her own face? Note the arithmetic while you watch: the title promises 5 to 7, the film runs ninety minutes, and the last half hour is not shown. Then watch the windows. Count how long it takes, after the wig comes off, before anything in Paris gives her back to herself.