Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962, Agnès Varda) (Patreon)

62/100

Second viewing, last seen 2001. A film I love conceptually but find only sporadically effective from real-time moment to real-time moment, with my favorite stretch by far being (roughly) 17 h. 45 through 18 h. 12*, from the point at which Cléo finally removes that terrible wig (which also seems to free Corinne Marchand from the more mannered aspects of her performance) to the point at which she meets a nice fella (played by Varda's pre-Demy paramour) who'll accompany her for the rest of the movie. That half hour or so in particular finds just the right mix of anxious introspection and a suddenly heightened awareness of one's surroundings—Paris, in this case, from its noisy cafés to its frog-swallowing buskers. While I didn't much care for Malick's A Hidden Life, that film's final few minutes, as our martyred hero takes one last intense look at the world en route to his execution, is almost unbearably moving; at its strongest, Cléo extends that feeling of beauty refracted through mortality, which I imagine is precisely what Varda had in mind. I do wish, however, that she didn't keep prodding us via ostensibly offhanded yet blatantly significant comments, e.g. a cab driver saying "It's not the death penalty if we get stopped" and—hard not to cringe at this one—Mr. Potentially Right observing in eager-beaver close-up that "Today the sun leaves Gemini for Cancer." Likewise Cléo's attraction to impractical black hats during the shopping sequence, and her rehearsal of a mournful Michel Legrand song featuring such pointed lyrics as "I'm like an empty house" and "Like a deserted isle invaded by the sea." That sort of nudge-nudge isn't half as affecting as, say, Cléo watching a friend model for a life-drawing class, with the friend's ease in her body amplifying Cléo's awareness that her own body may be in active revolt. Were the entire film similarly oblique—see also the ending, which kinda splits the difference between happy and ominous—I'd be considerably more enthusiastic. But it's still often quite lovely.

* A larger percentage of the running time than one would assume from the title, as we actually follow Cléo only from 5 to about 6:30. She knocks off early.